Ring

8

His legs locked around a branch of the kapok tree, Arrow Maker raised his bow toward the skydome. The taut bowstring dug into the tough flesh of his three middle fingers, and the bow itself had a feeling of heaviness, of power. The arrow balanced in his grasp, light, perfect.

Maker’s bare, hairless skin was slick from the exertion of climbing. He was close to the top of the canopy here, and the clicks, rustles, trills and coughs of the approaching evening sounded from everywhere within the great layer of life around him. Somewhere a group of howler monkeys were calling out their territorial claims, their eerie, almost choral wails rising and falling.

He released the bow string.

The arrow hissed into the air, and the guide line it towed unraveled past Arrow Maker’s face with the faintest of breezes.

He heard a clatter in the branches, a few yards away from him, as the arrow returned. But the line didn’t fall back; Maker had succeeded in hooking it over an upper branch of the kapok.

He slung his bow across his shoulder, retrieved his quiver, and clambered across the branches, his bare feet easily finding purchase on moss-laden bark. He found the arrow in a mound of moss at the junction of a banyan’s trunk with a branch. Working quickly and efficiently, Arrow Maker unraveled a rope from his waist and attached it to the line; the rope — spun by his daughter from liana fiber — was as thick as his finger, and, working by touch. Maker found the rope heavy and difficult to knot.

When the rope was firmly attached Arrow Maker began to haul at the guide line. The rope slithered up through layers of leaves. Soon Maker had pulled the rope over the branch above. He tugged at the rope; there was some give, as the unseen kapok branch flexed, but the hold was more than strong enough to support his weight.

He detached the guide line and wrapped it around his waist. He clipped two metal hand-grips onto the rope. There was a webbing stirrup attached to each grip, and Arrow Maker placed his feet in these. Standing with his weight in one stirrup he moved the other a few feet upwards. Then he raised himself and moved the other grip, up past the first. Thus Arrow Maker climbed smoothly up through the remaining layers of canopy. The grips slid upwards easily, but ratchets prevented them from slipping down. One of the grips felt a little loose — it was worn, he suspected — but it was secure enough.

As he climbed up through layers of greenery toward the sky, Maker relaxed into the familiar rhythm of the simple exercise, enjoying the glowing feeling in his joints as his muscles worked. The heavy belt around his waist, with its pockets of webbing for his tools and food, bumped softly against his skin; he barely noticed the bow and quiver slung over his shoulder.

The grips, and ropes and stirrups, had belonged to Arrow Maker for at least twenty years. They were among his most treasured possessions: his life depended on them, and they were almost irreplaceable. The people of the forest could make rope, and bows, and face paint, but they simply didn’t have the raw materials to manufacture grips and stirrups — or, come to that, knives, spectacles and many other essential day-to-day objects. Even old Uvarov — rolling around the forest floor in his chair — admitted as much.

To get his set of climbing gear, the younger Arrow Maker had traded with the Undermen.

He’d spent many days collecting forest produce: fruit, the flesh of birds, bowls of copaifera sap. He piled his goods in one of the great Locks set in the floor of the forest. He’d communicated his needs to the Undermen by an elaborate series of scratches made with the point of his knife in the scarred surface of the Lock.

When he’d returned to the Lock the next day, there lay the climbing gear he’d wanted, gleaming new and neatly laid out. Of the forest goods there was no sign.

The forest folk relied on Underman artifacts to stay alive. But similarly, Arrow Maker had often thought, perhaps the Undermen needed forest food to survive. Perhaps it was dark down there, beneath the forest, cut off from the light; perhaps the Men couldn’t grow their own food. Arrow Maker shivered; he had a sudden vision of a race of nocturnal, huge-eyed creatures skulking like loris through the lifeless, ever-darkened levels below his feet.

He reached the top of his rope. The anchoring branch was only a couple of hand’s-breadths thick, but it was solid enough. A tree-swift’s nest — a ball of bark and feathers, glued by spittle — clung to the side of the branch, sheltering its single egg.

He selected a fatter branch and sat on it, wrapping his legs around its junction with the trunk. He placed his bow and quiver carefully beside him, lodging them safely. He drew some dried meat from his belt and chewed at the tough, salty stuff as he gazed around.

Now he’d climbed close to the crown of the kapok tree. The great tree’s last few branches were silhouetted against the darkling skydome above him, their clusters of brownish leaves rustling.

The mass of the canopy was perhaps thirty yards below the skydome, but this single giant kapok raised its bulk above the rest, its uppermost branches almost grazing the sky. The darkness of the evening rendered this upper world almost as dark as the forest floor, far below him. But Maker knew his way around the kapok; after all he’d been climbing it for most of his eighty years.

He was at the top of the world. In the distance a bird flapped across the sky, its colors a gaudy splash against the fading light. Beyond the skydome, the stars were coming out. The kapok’s branches were a dense, tangled mass beneath him, obscuring its immense trunk. Seeds — fragments of fluffy down — floated everywhere, peppering the leaves with the last of the daylight. Ten yards below the tree’s crown, the canopy was a rippling carpet, a dense layer of greenery turning oily black as night approached — which stretched to the horizon, lapping against the walls of the skydome itself.

Garry Uvarov had sent Arrow Maker up here to inspect the sky. So Maker tipped up his face.

It was tempting to reach up and see if he could touch the sky.

He couldn’t, of course — the skydome was still at least twenty feet above him but it would be easy enough to shoot up an arrow, to watch it clatter against the invisible roof.

The sky was unchanged. The stars were a thin, irregular sprinkling, hardly disturbing the sky’s deep emptiness. Most of the stars were dull red points of light, like drops of blood, that were often difficult to see.

Uvarov had never shown interest in the stars before; now, suddenly, he’d ordered Arrow Maker to climb the trees, telling him to expect a sky blazing with stars, white, yellow and blue. Well, he’d been quite wrong.

Maker felt that old Uvarov was important: precious, like a talisman. But, as the years wore by, his words and imperatives seemed increasingly irrational.

Maker looked for the sky patterns he’d grown to know since his boyhood. There were the three stars, of a uniform brightness, in a neat row; there the familiar circle of stars dominated by a bright, scarlet gleam.

Nothing had changed in the sky above him, in the stars beyond the dome. Arrow Maker didn’t even know what Uvarov was expecting him to find.

He clambered down into the bulk of the kapok treetop, so that there was a comforting layer of greenery between himself and the bare sky. Then he tied himself to the trunk with a loop of rope, laid his head against a pillowing arm and waited for sleep.

The klaxon’s oscillating wail echoed off the houses, the empty streets, the walls of the sky.

Morrow woke immediately.

For a moment he lay in bed, staring into the sourceless illumination which bathed the ceiling above him.

Waking, at least, was easy. Some mornings the klaxon failed to sound — it was as imperfect and liable to failure as every other bit of equipment in the world but on those mornings Morrow found his eyes opening on time, just as usual. He pictured his brain as a worn, ancient thing, with grooves of habit ground into its surface. He woke at the same time, every day.

Just as he had for the last five centuries.

Stiffly he swung his legs from his pallet and stood up. He started to think through the shift ahead. Today he was due for an interview with Planner Milpitas — yet another interview, he thought — and he felt his heart sink.

He walked to the window and swung his arms back and forth to generate a little circulation in his upper body. From his home here on Deck Two Morrow could make out, through the open, multilayered flooring, some details of Deck Three below; he looked down over houses, factories, offices and — looming above all the other buildings — the imposing shoulders of the Planner Temples, scattered across the split levels like blocky clouds. Beyond the buildings and streets stood the walls of the world: sheets of metal, ribbed for strength. And over it all lay the multilevelled sky, a lid of girders and panels, enclosing and oppressive.

He worked through his morning rituals — washing, shaving his face and scalp, taking some dull, high-fiber food. He dressed in his cleanest standard-issue dungarees. Then he set off for his appointment with Planner Milpitas.

The community occupied two Decks, Two and Three. The inhabited Decks were laid out following a circular geometry, in a pattern of sectors and segments divided from each other by roads tracing out chords and radii. Deck Four, the level beneath Three, was accessible but uninhabited; Superet had long ago decreed that it be used as a source of raw materials. And there was also one level above, called Deck One, which was also uninhabited but served other purposes.

Morrow had no idea what lay above Deck One, or below Deck Four. The Planners didn’t encourage curiosity.

There were few people about as he crossed the Deck. He walked, of course; the world was only a mile across, so walking or cycling almost always sufficed. Morrow lived in Segment 2, an undesirable slice of the Deck close to the outer hull. The Temple was in Sector 3 — almost diametrically opposite, but close to the heart of the Deck. Morrow was able to cut down the radial walkways, past Sector 5, and walk almost directly to the Temple.

Much of Sector 4 was still known as Poole Park — a name which had been attached to it since the ship’s launch, Morrow had heard. There was nothing very park-like about it now, though. Morrow, in no hurry to be early for Milpitas, walked slowly past rows of poor, shack-like dwellings and shops. The shops bore the names of their owners and their wares, but also crude, vivid paintings of the goods to be obtained inside. Here and there, between the walls of the shops, weeds and wild flowers struggled to survive. He passed a couple of maintenance ’bots: low-slung trolleys fitted with brushes and scoops, toiling their way down the worn streets.

The rows of small dwellings, the boxy shops and meeting places, the libraries and factories, looked as they always did: not drab, exactly — each night everything was cleansed by the rain machines — but uniform.

Some old spark stirred in Morrow’s tired mind. Uniform. Yes, that was the word. Dreadfully uniform. Now he was approaching the Planners’ Temple. The tetrahedral pyramid was fully fifty yards high, built of gleaming metal and with its edges highlighted in blue. Morrow felt dwarfed as he approached it, and his steps slowed, involuntarily; in a world in which few buildings were taller than two stories, the Temples were visible everywhere, huge, faceless — and intimidating.

As, no doubt, they were meant to be.

Planner Milpitas turned the bit of metal over and over in his long fingers, eyeing Morrow. His desk was bare, the walls without adornment. “You ask too many questions, Morrow.” The Planner’s bare scalp was stretched paper-thin over his skull and betrayed a faint tracery of scars.

Morrow tried to smile; already, as he entered the interview, he felt immensely tired. “I always have.”

The Planner didn’t smile. “Yes. You always have. But my problem is that your questions sometimes disturb others.”

Morrow tried to keep himself from trembling. At the surface of his mind there was fear, and a sense of powerlessness — but beneath that there was an anger he knew he must struggle to control. Milpitas could, if he wished, make life very unpleasant for Morrow.

Milpitas held up the artifact. “Tell me what this is.”

“It’s a figure-of-eight ring.”

“Did you make it?”

Morrow shrugged. “I don’t know. Perhaps. It’s a standard design in the shops on Deck Four.”

“All right.” Milpitas placed the ring on his desk, with a soft clink. “Tell me what else you make. Give me a list.”

Morrow closed his eyes and thought. “Parts for some of the machines — the food dispensers, for instance. Not the innards, of course — we leave that to the nanobots — but the major external components. Material for buildings — joists, pipes, cables. Spectacles, cutlery: simple things that the nanobot maintenance crews can’t repair.”

Milpitas nodded. “And?”

“And things like your figure-of-eight ring.” Morrow struggled, probably failing, to keep a note of frustration out of his voice. “And ratchets, and stirrups. Scrapers — ”

“All right. Now, Morrow, the value of a joist, or a pair of spectacles, is obvious. But what do you think of this question: what is the value of your figure-of-eight rings, ratchets and stirrups?”

Morrow hesitated. This was exactly the kind of question which had landed him in trouble in the first place. “I don’t know,” he blurted at last. “Planner, it drives me crazy not to know. I look at these things and try to work out what they might be used for, but — ”

The Planner raised his hands. “You’re not answering me, Morrow.”

Morrow was confused. He’d long since learned that when dealing with people like Milpitas, words turned into weapons, fine blades whose movements he could barely follow. “But you asked me what the ratchets were for.”

“No. I asked you what you thought of the question, not for an answer to the question itself. That’s very different.”

Morrow tried to work that out. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

“No.” The Planner rested his long, surgery-scarred fingers on the desk before him. Milpitas seemed to be one of those unfortunate individuals suffering a partial AS failure, necessitating this kind of gross rework of his body. “No, I really believe you don’t. And that’s precisely the problem, isn’t it, Morrow?”

He stood and walked to the window of his office. From here Morrow could see the outer frame of the Temple; its face was a tilted plane of golden light. Milpitas’ wide, bony face was framed by the iron sky, the sourceless daylight.

“The question has no value,” Milpitas said at length. “And so an answer to it would have no value — it would be meaningless, because the question in itself has no reference to anything meaningful.” He turned to Morrow and smiled searchingly. “I know you’re not happy with that answer. Go ahead; don’t be afraid. Tell me what you think.”

Morrow sighed. I think you’re crazy. “I think you’re playing with words.” He picked up the ring. “Of course this thing has a purpose. It exists, physically. We expend effort in making it — ”

“Everything we do has a purpose, Morrow, and one purpose only.” Milpitas looked solemn. “Do you know what that is?”

Morrow felt vaguely irritated. “The survival of the species. I’m not a child, Planner.”

“Exactly. Good. That’s why we’re here; that’s why Superet built this ship-world of ours; that’s why my grandmother — dead now, of course — and the others initiated this voyage. That’s the purpose that informs everything we do.”

Morrow’s irritation turned into a vague rebelliousness. Everything? Even the elimination of the children?

He wondered how many interviews, like this, he had suffered over the years.

Vaguely he remembered a time when things hadn’t been like this. Right at the start of his life, half a millennium ago, the great Virtual devices, hidden somewhere in the fabric of the world, had covered the drab hull walls with scenes of lost, beautiful panoramas: he remembered Virtual suns and moons crossing a Virtual sky, children running in the streets.

There had been a feeling of space — of infinity. The Virtuals had had the power to make this box-world seem immense, without constraints.

But Superet had closed down the Virtuals, one by one, exposing the skull-like reality of the world which lay beneath the illusion. No one now seemed to know where the Virtual machines were, or how to get access to them, even if they still worked.

At the same time Superet had first discouraged, then abolished, childbirth. Morrow had been one of the last children to be born, in fact.

Virtual dioramas — and the voices of children — were no longer necessary, Superet said.

There were no young, and the people grew old. There was neither day nor night, but only the endless, steel-gray, sourceless light which — diffused from the metal hull — gave the impression of a continual dawn. Leisure activities theaters, study groups, play groups — had fallen into disuse. The world was structured only by the endless drudgery of work.

Work, and study of the words of the founders of Superet, of course.

Milpitas turned his wide, rather coarse face to Morrow. “Superet’s one imperative is to ensure the survival of the species — physically, through our genes, and culturally, through the memes we carry — into the indefinite future.” He pointed to the iron sky. “Everything we do is driven by that logic, Morrow. For all we know, we are the only humans alive, anywhere. And so we must optimize the use of our resources.

“At present we’re succeeding. Our population is well-adjusted; we have no need of new generations — not until our resource situation changes.”

But, Morrow thought wildly, but the population isn’t stable. Every year people died — through accident, or obscure AS-failure. So, every year, the population actually fell.

Over the centuries he had witnessed the steady drop in population, the slow retreat from the lower Decks. When Morrow had been born, he was sure that the lifedome had been inhabited all the way down to Deck Eight — and it was said there were another seven or eight Decks below that. Now, only Decks Two and Three were occupied.

Could there be a point, he wondered, below which the race couldn’t regenerate itself, even if the temporary sterility was reversed?

What would Superet do then?

Milpitas sat down once more. When he spoke again, the Planner seemed to be trying to be kind. “Morrow, you must not torment yourself — and those around you — with questions that can’t be answered. You know, in principle, why our world is as it is. Isn’t that sufficient? Is it really necessary for you to understand every detail?”

But if I don’t understand, Morrow thought sourly, then you can control me. Arbitrarily. And that’s what I find hard to accept.

Milpitas steepled his fingers. “Here’s another dimension you need to think about.” His voice was harsher now. “Tell me, what are your views on the internal contradictions of the meme versus gene duality?”

Morrow, glowering, refused to answer.

Milpitas smiled, exquisitely patronizing. “You don’t understand the question, do you? Can you read?”

“Yes, I can read,” Morrow said testily. “I had to teach myself, but, yes, I can read.”

Milpitas frowned. “But you don’t need to be able to read. Most people don’t need to. It’s a luxury, Morrow; an indulgence.

“We must all accept our limitations, Morrow; you have to accept that there are people who know better than you do.”

Morrow steeled himself. Here it comes. No punishment was going to be terribly onerous, but he found any disruption from his daily routine increasingly difficult, even painful.

“Four weeks on Deck One,” Milpitas said briskly, making a note. “I’ll coordinate this with your supervisor in the shops. I’m sorry to do this, Morrow, but you must see my position; we can’t have you disrupting those around you with your — your ill-disciplined thinking.”

Deck One. The Locks. One of the most difficult — if not frightening — places to work on all the Decks. This was a tough punishment, for what he still couldn’t accept as a crime…

But, nevertheless, he found himself suppressing a grin at the irony of this. For the Locks — and the strange, illicit trade that went on through them — were an explicit embodiment of the contradictions within his society.

The first tendrils of morning light snaked up over the sky-dome like living things. The dim stars fled.

Arrow Maker unwrapped himself from his branch and stretched the stiffness out of his limbs. The breeze up here was fresh and dry. He urinated against the bole of the tree; the hot liquid darkened the wood and coursed down toward the canopy. He chewed on some of the meat from his belt, and lapped up dew moisture from the kapok’s leaves. The water wasn’t much, but he’d find more later, in the bowls of orchids and bromeliads.

He retrieved his bow and quiver, made his way to the rope he’d left dangling, and prepared for the first stage of his descent. He passed the rope through a metal figure-of-eight ring, clipped the ring to his belt, and stood up in his webbing stirrups. He slid easily downwards, controlling the run of the rope through the ring with his hand. The figured-eight ring, scuffed and worn with use, rang softly as he descended.

The canopy, fifty yards above the forest floor, was a twenty-yard-deep layer of vegetation. Arrow Maker was soon screened from the breeze of the topmost level, and the air grew moist, humid, comfortable.

He found a liana and cut it open; water spurted into his mouth. On his last visit to the canopy, Arrow Maker had spotted a fig-tree which had looked close to fruiting; he decided to take a detour there before returning to Uvarov. He wrapped his rope around his waist, tucked his climbing gear into his belt, and clambered across the canopy, working his way from branch to branch.

Moss and algae coated the bark of the trees and hung from twigs in sheets, making the wood dangerously slippery. Lianas, fig roots and the dangling roots of orchids, bromeliads and ferns festooned the branches like rope. Leaves shone in the gloom, like little green arrow-heads. Some of the flowers, designed to catch the attention of hummingbirds and sunbirds, gleamed red in the gloom; others, pale, fetid, waited patiently for bats to eat their fruit and so propagate their seeds.

Beyond the clutter of life, Maker could see the branchless trunks of the canopy trees. The trunks rose like columns of smoke through the greenery, smooth and massive.

The fig-tree was an incongruous tangle sprouting from the trunk of a canopy tree, a parasite feeding off its host tree. As he approached the fig he knew he’d been right about the fruiting. A parrot hung upside down from a branch, its feathers brilliant crimson, munching at a fig it held in one claw. The rich smell of ripe figs wafted from the leaves, and the branches were alive with animals and birds.

There was even a family of silver-leaf monkeys. Maker got quite close to one female, with a baby clinging to her back. For a few moments Maker watched her working at the fruit; she seemed to sniff each fig individually, as if trying to determine from the perfume if it was ready to consume. At last she found a fig to her liking and crammed it whole into her mouth, while her baby mewled at her neck.

The female suddenly became aware of Arrow Maker. Her small, perfect head swiveled toward him, her eyes round, and for an instant she froze, her gaze locked with Maker’s. Then she turned and bounded away through rustling leaves, lost to his sight in a moment.

He worked his way toward the fig, shouting and clapping his hands to scare the scavengers away. He even roused a cluster of fruit bats, unusually feeding during the day; they scattered at his approach, their huge, loose, leathery wings rustling.

At length he reached the bough of the canopy tree, which was wrapped around with fig roots. This was actually a strangler fig, he realized; the crown of the fig was so dense that it was blocking out the light from its host and would eventually take its place in the canopy.

“Arrow Maker.”

His name was whispered, suddenly, close behind him. He turned, startled, and almost lost his grip on the algae-coated branch below him; his bow rattled against his bare back, clumsily.

It was Spinner-of-Rope. Her face was round in the gloom as she grinned at him. Spinner, his older daughter, was fifteen years old, and her short, slim body was as lithe as a monkey’s. She bore a full sack at her back. A bright smear of scarlet dye crossed her face, picking out her eyes and nose like a mask; her hair was shaven back from her scalp and dangled in a fringe over her ears down to her shoulders, rich black. Her metal spectacles shone in the green light.

“Got you,” she said.

He tried to recover his dignity. “That was irresponsible.”

She snorted and rubbed at her stub of a nose. “Oh, sure. I saw you creeping up on that poor silver-leaf. With her baby, too.” Squatting in the branches, she moved toward him menacingly. “Maybe I should climb on your back and see how you like it — ”

“Don’t bother.” He settled against the bough of the tree, pulled a fig from a branch and bit into it. “What’s in the sack?”

“Figs, and honeycombs, and a few tubers I dug up earlier from the floor… I breakfasted on beetle grubs from inside a fallen trunk down there.” She looked remote for a moment as she remembered her meal. “Delicious… What are you doing here anyway? I thought you were down with old Uvarov.”

“I am. In principle. It’s my turn…”

The tribe’s fifty people lived out most of their lives in the canopy. So Garry Uvarov had instituted a rota, designating folk who had to spend time with him on the floor below. Uvarov raged if the rota was broken, insisting that even the rota itself was older than any human alive, save himself.

“Uvarov sent me up top — to the giant kapok — to see if the stars had changed.”

Spinner grunted; she took a fig herself and ate it whole, like a monkey. She wiped her lips on a leaf. “Why?”

“I don’t know…”

“Then he’s an old fool. And so are you.”

Arrow Maker sighed. “You shouldn’t say things like that, Spinner. Uvarov is an old man — an ancient man. He remembers when the ship was launched, and — ”

“I know, I know.” She picked seeds from her teeth with her little finger. “But he’s also a crazy old man, and getting crazier.”

Arrow Maker decided not to argue. “But whether that’s true or not, we still have to care for him. We can’t let him die. Would you want that?” He searched her face, seeking signs of understanding. “And if you — and your friends — don’t take your turns in the rota — ”

“Which we don’t.”

” — then it means that people like me have to carry more than our fair share.”

Spinner-of-Rope grinned in triumph, her face paint vivid. “So you admit you resent having to tend for that old relic down there.”

“Yes. No.” With a few words she’d made him intensely uncomfortable, as she seemed to manage so often, and so easily. “Oh, I don’t know, Spinner. But we can’t let him die.”

She bit into another fig, and said casually, “Why not?”

“Because he’s a human being who deserves dignity, if nothing else,” he snapped. “And — ”

“And what?”

And, he thought, I’m afraid that if Uvarov is allowed to die, the world will come to an end.

The world was so obviously artificial.

The forest was contained in a box. It was possible to shoot an arrow against the sky. There were holes in the floor, and whole levels — the domain of the Undermen — underneath the world. Hidden machines brought light to the sky-dome each day, caused the rain to fall over the waiting leaves, and pumped the air around the canopy tops. Perhaps there were more subtle machines too, he speculated sometimes, which sustained the little closed world in other ways.

The world must seem huge to Spinner. But it had become small and fragile in Arrow Maker’s eyes, and as he grew older he became increasingly aware of how dependent all the humans of the forest were on mechanisms that were ancient and inaccessible.

If the mechanisms failed, they would all die; to Arrow Maker it was as simple, and as unforgettable, as that.

Garry Uvarov was an old fool in a wheelchair, with no obvious influence on the mechanisms which kept them all alive. And yet, it seemed undoubtedly true that he was indeed as old as he claimed — that he was a thousand years old, as old as the ship itself — that he remembered Earth.

Uvarov was a link with the days of the ship’s construction. Arrow Maker felt, with a deep, superstitious dread, that if Uvarov were to die — if that tangible link to the past were ever broken — then perhaps the ship itself would die, around them.

And then, how could they possibly survive?

He looked at his daughter, troubled, wondering if he would ever be able to explain this to her.

9

Lieserl roused — slowly, fitfully — from her long sleep.

She stirred, irritated; she peered around, blinking her Virtual eyes, trying to understand what had disturbed her. Motion of some kind?

Motion, in this million-degree soup?

Virtual arms folded against her chest, legs tucked beneath her, she floated slowly through the compressed plasma of the radiative zone. Around her, all but unnoticed, high-energy photons performed their complex, million-year dance as they worked their way out of the core toward the surface.

After all this time, she had drifted to within no more than a third of a Solar radius of the center of the Sun itself.

She ran brief diagnostic checks over her remaining data stores. She found more damage, of course; more cumulative depredation by the unceasing hand of entropy. She wondered vaguely how much of her original processing and memory capacity she was left with by now. Ten percent? Less, perhaps?

How would she feel, if she roused herself to full awareness now? She’d never used her full capacity anyway — there was immense redundancy built into the systems — but she would surely be aware of some loss: gaps in her memory, perhaps, or a degradation of her sense of her Virtual body — a numbness, imperfectly realized skin.

Lieserl, she told herself, you’re getting old, all over again. The first human in history to grow old for the second time.

Another first, for the freak lady.

She smiled and snuggled her face closer to her knees. Once, her depth of self awareness and her ability to access huge memory stores had made her the most conscious human — or quasihuman, anyway — in history. So she’d been told.

Well, that couldn’t be true any more.

Always assuming there were still humans left to compare herself against, of course.

Plasma still poured through the faces of the Interface which cradled her ancient, battered data stores; somewhere beyond the Sun, the energy dumped through the refrigerating wormhole must still blaze like a miniature star, perhaps casting its shadows across the photosphere. She knew the wormhole refrigerating link must be operating still, and that the various enhancements the engineers had made to it, as she’d gone far beyond her design envelope in her quest deeper into the Sun, must still be working. After a fashion, anyway.

She knew all that, because if the link wasn’t working, she would be dead.

It was even conceivable that there were still people at the other end of the wormhole, getting useful data out of the link. In fact, she vaguely hoped so, in spite of everything. That had been the point of this expedition in the first place, after all. Just because they no longer chose to speak to her didn’t mean they weren’t there.

Anyway, it scarcely mattered; she’d no intention of waking out of the drowsy half-sleep within which she had whiled away the years — and centuries, and millennia…

But there was that hint of motion again. Something elusive, transient -

It was no more than a shadow, streaking across the rim of her sensorium, barely visible even to her enhanced senses. She tried to turn, to track the elusive ghost; but she was stiff, clumsy, her “limbs” rusty from centuries of abandonment.

The fizzing shadow arced across her vision again, surging along a straight line and out of her sight.

Working with unaccustomed haste, she initiated self-repair routines throughout her system. She analyzed what she’d seen, decomposing the compound image presented to her visually into its underlying component forms.

She felt dimly excited. If she’d been human still, she knew, her heart would be beating faster, and a surge of adrenaline would make her skin tighten, her breathing speed up, her senses become more vivid. For the first time in historic ages she felt impatience with the cocoon of shut-down Virtual senses which swaddled her; it was as if the machinery stopped her from feeling…

She considered the results of her analysis. The image scarcely existed; no wonder it had looked like a ghost to her. It was no more than a faint shadow against the flood of neutrinos from the Solar core, a vague coherence among scintillas of interaction with the slow-moving protons of the plasma…

The shadow she’d seen had been a structure of dark matter. A thing of photinos, orbiting the heart of the Sun.

She felt jubilant. At last — and just at the depth, a third of a Solar radius out from the center, that she and Kevan had deduced it would be all those years ago, she’d found what she’d come here for — the prize for which her humanity had been engineered away. At last she’d penetrated to the edge of the Sun’s dark matter shadow core, to the near-invisible canker which was smothering its fusion fire.

She waited for the photino object to return.

Arrow Maker slid toward the ground.

He passed through another layer of leaves: this was the forest’s understorey, made up of darkness-adapted palms and a few saplings, young trees growing from seeds dropped by the canopy trees. The light at this level — even now, at midday — was dim, drenched in the green of the canopy. The air was hot, stagnant, moist.

Arrow Maker reached the ground, close to the base of a huge tree. Under one of his bare soles, a beetle wriggled, working its way through decaying leaf matter. Arrow Maker reached down, absently, picked up the beetle and popped it into his mouth.

He hauled his rope down from the tree and set off across the forest floor.

Beneath the thin soil he could feel the tree’s thick mat of rootlets. The trees were supported by immense buttresses: triangular fins, five yards wide at their base, which sprouted from the clustering trunks. A thin line of termites — a ribbon hundreds of yards long marched steadily across the floor close to his feet, on their way to the tree trunk cleft that housed their nest.

He passed splashes of color amid the corruption of the forest floor — mostly dead flowers, fallen from the canopy — but there was also one huge rafflesia: a single flower a yard across, leafless, its maroon petals thick, leathery and coated with warts. A revolting stench of putrescence came from its interior, and flies, mesmerized by the scent, swarmed around the vast cup.

Arrow Maker, preoccupied, walked around the grotesque bloom.

“…Where in Lethe have you been?”

Uvarov’s chair came rolling toward Maker, out of the shadows of his shelter.

Maker, startled, stumbled backwards. “I stopped to gather figs. They were ripe. I met my daughter — Spinner-of-Rope — and — ”

Garry Uvarov was ignoring him. Uvarov rolled his chair back into the shelter, its wheels heavy on the soft forest floor. “Tell me about the stars you saw,” he hissed. “The stars…”

Uvarov’s shelter was little more than a roof of ropes and palm leaves, a web suspended between a cluster of tree trunks. Beneath this roof the jungle floor had been cleared and floored over with crudely cut planks of wood, over which Uvarov could prowl, the wheels of his chair humming as they bore him to and fro, to and fro. There were resin torches fixed to the walls, unlit. Uvarov kept his few possessions here, most of them incomprehensible to Arrow Maker: boxes fronted by discs of glass, bookslates worn yellow and faded with use, cupboards, chairs and a bed into which Uvarov could no longer climb.

None of this had ever worked in Arrow Maker’s lifetime.

Garry Uvarov was swaddled in a leather blanket, which hid his useless limbs. His head — huge, skull-like, fringed by sky-white hair and with eyes hollowed out by corruption — lolled on a neck grown too weak to support it. If Uvarov could stand, he’d be taller than Arrow Maker by three feet. But, sprawled in his chair as he was, Uvarov looked like some grotesque doll, a crude thing constructed of rags and the skull of some animal, perhaps a monkey.

Maker studied Uvarov uneasily. The old man had never exactly been rational, but today there seemed to be an additional edge to his voice — perhaps a knife-edge of real madness, at last.

And if that was true, how was he — Arrow Maker — going to deal with it?

“Do you want anything? I’ll get you some — ”

Uvarov lifted his head. “Just tell me, damn you…” His leaf-like cheeks shook and spittle flecked his chin, signifying rage. But his voice — reconstructed by some machine generations ago — was a bland, inhuman whisper.

“I climbed the kapok — the tallest tree…” Arrow Maker, stumbling, tried to describe what he’d seen.

Uvarov listened, his head cocked back, his mouth lolling.

“The starbow,” he said at last. “Did you see the starbow?”

Arrow Maker shook his head. “I’ve never seen a starbow. Tell me what it looks like.”

Rage seemed to have enveloped Uvarov now; his chair rolled back and forth, back and forth, clattering over loose floorboards. “I knew it! No starbow… The ship’s slowing. We’ve arrived. I knew it…

“They’ve tried to exclude me. Those survivalist bastard Planners, and maybe even that wizened bitch Armonk. If she’s still alive.” He wheeled about, trying to point himself at Arrow Maker. “Don’t you see it? If there’s no starbow the ship must have arrived. The journey is over… After a thousand years, we’ve returned to Sol.”

“But you’re not making sense,” Arrow Maker protested weakly. “There’s never been a starbow. I don’t know what — ”

“The bastards… The bastards.” Uvarov continued his endless rolling. “We’ve returned, to fulfill our mission — Superet’s mission, not Louise Ye bloody Armonk’s! — and they want to shut me out. You, too, my children… My immortal children.

“Listen to me.” Uvarov wheeled about to face Maker again. “You must hear me; it’s very important. You’re the future, Arrow Maker… You, poor, ignorant as you are: you and your people are the future of the species.”

He wheeled to the lip of his flooring, now, and lifted his head to Arrow Maker. Maker could see pools of congealed blood at the pits of those empty eye sockets, and he recoiled from the heavy, fetid stink of the decaying body under its blanket. “You’ll not be betrayed by your damn AS nanobots the way I was. When the ’bots withered my limbs and chopped up my damn eyes, five centuries ago, I saw I’d been right all along…

“But now we’ve come home. The mission is over. That’s what the stars are telling you, if you only had eyes to see.

“I want you to gather the people. Get weapons — bows, blowpipes — anything you can find.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re going to go back into the Decks. For the first time in centuries. You have to reach the Interface. The wormhole Interface, Maker.”

The Decks…

Arrow Maker tried to envisage going through the Locks in the forest floor, entering the unknown darkness of the endless levels beneath his feet. Panic rose, sharp and painful in his throat.

Maker stumbled away from the little hut, and back into the familiar scents of the jungle. He raised his face to the canopy above, and the glowing sky beyond.

Could Uvarov be right? Was the thousand-year journey over — at last?

Suddenly Arrow Maker’s world seemed tiny, fragile, a mote adrift among impossible dangers. He longed to return to the canopy, to lose himself in the thick, moist air, in the scent of growing things.

“Milpitas was right,” Constancy-of-Purpose said. “Your trouble is you think too much, Morrow.” Her big voice boomed out, echoing from the bare metal walls of Deck One; Constancy-of-Purpose seemed oblivious of the huge emptiness around them — the desolate dwellings, the endless, shadowed places of this uninhabited place.

Constancy-of-Purpose opened up a Lock. The Lock was a simple cylinder which rose from the floor and merged seamlessly with the ceiling, a hundred yards above their heads. Constancy-of-Purpose had opened a door in the Lock’s side, but there was also (Morrow had noticed) a hatch inside the cylinder twenty feet above them, blocking off the cylinder’s upper section.

All the Locks were alike. But Morrow had never seen an upper hatch opened, and knew no one who had.

Today, this Lock contained a pile of pineapples, plump and ripe, and a few flagons of copafeira sap. Morrow held open a bag, and Constancy-of-Purpose started methodically to shovel the fruit out of the Lock and into the bag, her huge biceps working. “You have to accept things as they are,” she went on. “Our way of life here hasn’t changed for centuries — you have to admit that. So the Planners must be doing something right. Why not give them the benefit of the doubt?”

Constancy-of-Purpose was a big, burly woman who habitually wore sleeveless tunics, leaving the huge muscles of her arms exposed. Her face, too, was strong, broad and patient, habitually placid beneath her shaven scalp. The lower half of her body, by contrast, was wasted, spindly, giving her a strangely unbalanced look.

Morrow said to Constancy-of-Purpose, “You always talk to me as if I were still a child.” As, in Constancy-of-Purpose’s eyes, he probably always would be. Constancy-of-Purpose was twenty years older than Morrow, and she had always assumed the role of older mentor — even now, after five centuries of life, when a mere couple of decades could go by barely noticed. The fact that they’d once been married, for a few decades, had made no long-term difference to their relationship at all. “Look, Constancy-of-Purpose, so much of our little world just doesn’t make sense. And it drives me crazy to think about it.”

Constancy-of-Purpose straightened up and rested her fists on her hips; her face gleamed with sweat. “No, it doesn’t.”

“What?”

“It doesn’t drive you crazy. Nobody as old as you — or me — is capable of being driven crazy by anything. We don’t have the energy to be mad any more, Morrow.”

Morrow sighed. “All right. But it ought to drive me crazy. And you. There’s so much that is simply — unsaid.” He hoisted the half-full sack of fruit. “Look at the work we’re doing now, even. This simply isn’t logical.”

“Logical enough. Copafeira sap is a useful fuel. And we need the fruit to supplement the supply machines, which haven’t worked properly since — ”

“Yes,” Morrow said, exasperated, “but where does the fruit come from? Who brings it here, to these Locks? And — ”

“And what?”

“And what do they want with the ratchets, and knives, and figure-of-eight rings we bring them?”

Morrow picked up the sap flagons, and Constancy-of-Purpose slung the fruit bag over her shoulder. They began the hundred-yard walk to the next Lock. Constancy-of-Purpose moved with an uneven, almost waddling motion, her stick-like legs seeming almost too weak to support the massive bulk of her upper body. Some obscure nanobot failure had left her legs shriveled, spindly and — Morrow suspected, though Constancy-of-Purpose never complained — arthritic.

“I don’t know,” said Constancy-of-Purpose simply. “And I don’t think about it.” She looked sideways at Morrow.

“But it doesn’t make sense.” Morrow looked up, nervously, at the bulkhead above him. “This fruit must come from somewhere. There must be people up there, Constancy-of-Purpose — people we’ve never seen, whose existence has never been acknowledged by the Planners, or — ”

“People whose existence doesn’t matter a damn, then.”

“But it does. We trade with them.” He stopped and held out his sack of fruit. “Look at this. We’ve carried on this trade with them — thereby implicitly acknowledging their existence — for decades now.”

Constancy-of-Purpose kept walking, painfully. “Centuries, actually.”

When he was a young man, Morrow had been angry just about the whole time, he recalled. Now — even now — he felt a ghostly surge of that old anger. He felt obscurely proud of himself: a feeling of anger was as rare an event as achieving an erection, these days. “But that means our society is, at its core, slightly insane.”

Constancy-of-Purpose shook her massive head and studied Morrow, a tolerant look on her face. “Keep up that talk, and you’ll spend the rest of your life up here. Or somewhere worse.”

“Just think about it,” Morrow said. “A whole society, laboring under a mass delusion… No wonder they shut down the Virtuals. No wonder they banned kids.”

“But we’re all kept fed. Aren’t we? So it can’t be that crazy.” She smiled, her broad face assuming a look of wisdom. “Humans are a very flawed species, Morrow. We simply don’t seem to be able to act rationally, for very long. This sort of thing — a trade with the nonexistent unknowns upstairs — seems a minor aberration to me.”

Morrow studied her curiously. “You believe that? And I think of me as skeptical.”

Constancy-of-Purpose had reached the next Lock; she dropped her sack and leant against the curving metal wall, her hands resting on her knees. “You know, we have this conversation every few years, my friend.”

Morrow frowned. “Really? Do we?”

“Of course.” Constancy-of-Purpose smiled. “At our age, even doubting becomes a habit. And we never come to any conclusion, and the world goes on. Just as it always has.” She straightened up, cautiously flexing her thin legs. “Come on. Let’s get on with our work.”

With a twist of her huge upper arms Constancy-of-Purpose hauled open the door of the Lock.

Then — instead of stepping forward to gather the food-stuffs — she frowned, and looked at Morrow uncertainly. “…I don’t understand.”

“What is it?”

“Look.”

The Lock was empty.

Morrow stared at Constancy-of-Purpose, and then into the empty chamber. He couldn’t take in what he was seeing. These trades had never gone wrong before.

“The knives have gone,” he said.

“We left them here yesterday.”

“But there’s no meat.”

“But the scratches clearly said the knives were what they wanted…”

This dialogue went on for perhaps five minutes. Part of Morrow was able to step outside — to look at himself and Constancy-of-Purpose with a certain detachment, even with pity. Here were two old people, too hopelessly habit-bound to respond to the unexpected.

Constancy-of-Purpose is right. I’ve become like a machine, he thought with anger and sadness. Worse than a machine.

Constancy-of-Purpose said, “I’ll go in and check the markings. Maybe we made some mistake.”

“We never made a mistake before. How could we?”

“I’ll go check anyway.”

Constancy-of-Purpose stepped forward into the Lock and peered up, squinting, at the trade markings.

…And the hatch at the top of the Lock, twenty feet above Constancy-of Purpose’s head, started to open.

Inside the plasma sea, time held little meaning for Lieserl.

As she sank into the Sun she’d abandoned all her Virtual senses, save for sight and a residual body awareness; drifting through the billowing, cloudy plasma was like a childhood vision of sleep, or an endless, oceanic meditation. She’d slowed the clocks which governed her awareness, and allowed herself to slip into long periods of true “sleep” — of unawareness, when she drifted with only her autonomic systems patiently functioning.

And she had allowed, without regret, the crucial link of synchronization between her sensorium and the Universe outside to be severed. While she had drifted around the core of the Sun, sinking almost imperceptibly deeper into its heart, dozens of centuries had worn away on the worlds of mankind…

Here came the photino structure again.

This time she was ready. She strained at the structure as it passed her, every sense open.

Still, she could barely make it out; it was like a crude charcoal sketch against the glowing plasma background.

Wistfully she watched the photino cloud soar out of sight once more, passing through the plasma as if it were no more substantial than mist, on its minutes long orbit around the Sun.

But -

But, had it diverged from its orbit as it passed her? Was it possible that the photino object had actually reacted to her presence?

Now she became aware of more motion, below and ahead of her. The moving forms were shadowy, infuriatingly elusive against the gleaming, almost featureless background. Frustrated, she strained at her senses, demanding that her aged processors extract every last bit of information content from the data they were receiving.

Slowly the images enhanced, gaining in definition and sharpness.

There were hundreds — no: thousands, millions — of the photino traces. Maybe they were standing-wave patterns, she wondered, traces of coherence on the dark matter cloud.

Slowly she built up an image in her head, a composite model of the patterns: a roughly lenticular form, with length of perhaps fifty yards — and, she realized slowly, some hints of an internal structure.

Internal structure?

Well, so much for the standing-wave theory. These things seemed to be discrete objects, not merely patterns of coherence in a continuum.

She watched the objects as they traced their orbits around the center of the Sun. The soaring lens-shapes reminded her of graphics of the contents of a blood stream; she wondered if the structures were indeed like antibodies, or thrombocytes — blood platelets, swarming in search of a wound. They swarmed over and past each other, miraculously never colliding -

No, she realized slowly. There was nothing miraculous about it. The objects were steering away from each other, as they soared through their orbits.

This was a flock. The dark matter structures were alive.

Alive and purposeful.

Slowly she drifted into the flock of photino birds (as she’d tentatively labeled them). They swooped around her, avoiding her gracefully.

They were clearly reacting to her presence. They were obviously aware — if not intelligent, she thought.

She wondered what to do next. She wished she had Kevan Scholes to talk to about this.

Sweet, patient Kevan had come to the Sun as a junior research associate; his tour of duty had been meant to be only a few years. But he’d stayed on much longer in near-Solar orbit to serve as her patient capcom, far beyond the call of duty or friendship. In the end her long distance relationship with Scholes had lasted decades.

Well, she’d been grateful for his loyalty. He’d helped her immeasurably through those first difficult years inside the Sun.

Fitfully, she tried to remember the last time he spoke to her.

In the end he’d simply been removed. Why? To serve some organizational, political, cultural change? She’d never been told.

She had come to learn, with time, that human organizations — even if staffed by AS-preserved semi-immortals — had a half-life of only a few decades. Those that survived longer persisted only as shells, usually transmuted far from the aims of their founders. She thought of the slow corruption of the Holy Superet Light Church, apparent even in her own brief time outside the Sun, into a core organization of fanatics huddled around some eternal flame of ancient belief.

A succession of capcoms had taken their places at the microphones at the other end of her wormhole link. She’d been shown their faces, by images dumped through the telemetry channels. So she knew what they looked like, that parade of ever more odd-looking men and women with their evanescent fashions and styles and their increasing remoteness of expression. Language evolution and other cultural changes were downloaded into her data stores, so the drift of the human worlds away from the time she’d grown up in (however briefly) didn’t cause her communication problems. But none of it engaged her. After Kevan Scholes she found little interest in, or empathy with, the succession of firefly people who communicated with her.

Sometimes she had wondered how she must seem to them — a cranky, antique quasi-human trapped inside a piece of rickety old technology.

Then, at last, they had stopped talking to her altogether.

Oddly, though, she still felt — in spite of everything — loyal to humanity. They’d manufactured her quite cynically for their own purposes and finally abandoned her here, in the heart of this alien world; and yet she couldn’t cut herself off from people, in her mind. After all, whether they would speak to her or not, her wormhole refrigeration link could easily have been closed down — her consciousness terminated — as trivially as turning out a light. But that hadn’t happened.

So, she thought resentfully, they hadn’t bothered to kill her off. For this did she owe them loyalty? She tried to be cynical. Should she have to bow and scrape, just for the favor of her continuing life?

But, despite her determination to be tough-minded, she found she retained a residual urge to communicate — to broadcast her news beyond the Sun, to tell all she had found out about the photino birds — just in case anyone was listening.

It wasn’t logical. And yet, she did care; it was a nagging sense of responsibility — even of duty — that she simply couldn’t flush out of her consciousness.

After a time, in fact, she had begun to grow suspicious of this very persistence. After all, she had represented quite an investment, for the Superet of her time. Her brief had been to find out what was happening to the Sun, and she could only fulfill her brief, clearly, if she reported back to somebody. So maybe the need to communicate, even with non-receptive listeners, had been deeply embedded into the programming of the systems which underlay her awareness. Perhaps it was even hard-wired into the physical systems.

After all this time, they’re still manipulating me, she thought sourly.

But even if that were true, there wasn’t much she could do about it; the result was, though, that she was left with an irritating itch — and no way to scratch it.

Morrow simply stared. He didn’t feel fear, or curiosity. The upper hatch had never opened before. And — even though his eyes told him otherwise — it couldn’t be happening now.

Beyond the hatch was a tunnel, rising upwards — the tunnel was the inside of the cylindrical Lock, he realized. The light from above the hatch was dim, greenish. The air from the cylinder felt hot, humid, laden with secret, fruit-like scents.

He tried to find some appropriate response, to formulate some plan; but this new event skittered across the habit-worn surface of his mind like mercury across glass, unable to penetrate. He could only watch the events unfold, one after the other, as if he had been reduced to the state of a child, unable to connect incidents in any causal sequence.

Constancy-of-Purpose, too, seemed to be having trouble accepting any of this. She stood in the Lock with her head tipped back, gazing up, mouth slack…

Then there was a hissing noise, a soft, moist impact.

Constancy-of-Purpose clutched her arm.

She looked at Morrow with blank incomprehension — and then it was as if her wizened legs had failed her at last, for they crumpled, slowly, bearing her down to the floor of the Lock. For a few seconds she sat, her legs folded awkwardly under her. She looked surprised, confused. Then the great torso toppled sideways, sending the legs sprawling.

At last Morrow was able to move. He rushed into the Lock and, with effort, hauled Constancy-of-Purpose upright. Constancy-of-Purpose’s eyes were open but only the whites were showing; spittle drooled from her mouth. Her skin felt moist, cold. Morrow searched frantically for a pulse at Constancy-of-Purpose’s wrist, then amid the massive tendons of her neck.

A rope curled down from the hatch above, fraying, brown. Someone — something — descended, hand-over-hand, dropping lightly to the floor.

Morrow tried to study the invader, but it was as if he couldn’t even see him or her. This was simply too strange, too shocking; his eyes seemed to slide away from the invader, as if refusing to accept its reality.

Cradling Constancy-of-Purpose in his arms, he forced himself to take this one step at a time. First of all: human, certainly. He stared at four limbs, startlingly bright eyes behind spectacles, white teeth. Very short, no more than four feet tall. A child, then? Perhaps — but with the form, the breasts and hips, of a woman. And clothed in some suit of brown, with colorful flashes; dungarees, perhaps, which -

No. He forced himself to see. Save for a belt at the waist, bulging with pockets, this person was naked. Her skin was a rich brown. Her head was shaven at the scalp, but sported a fringe of thick, black, oiled hair. A mask of red paint sliced across her nose and eyes. She was carrying a long, fine-bored tube of wood. Her face was round — not pretty, but…

But young. She couldn’t be more than fifteen or sixteen years old.

But it wasn’t possible to AS-preserve at that age. So this was a child — a genuine child; the first he’d seen in five centuries.

She raised the tube warily, as if preparing to strike him, or fend him off.

“My name is Spinner-of-Rope,” she said. “I won’t hurt you.”

The old Underman was grotesque. Nearly as bad as Uvarov: bald, skinny, faded skin, dressed in some kind of stuffy, drab garment — and as tall as Uvarov would be, if he was laid out lengthways.

The Underman’s unconscious friend, the woman, was worse, with that huge upper body and spindly legs. The pair of them looked so old, so unnatural.

She felt revolted. There was an air of corruption about these people: of decay, of mold. She wanted to destroy them, get away, back to the clean air of the forest -

“What’s happening?” Maker’s voice came booming down the Lock shaft. “Spinner? Are you all right?”

She forced herself to put aside her emotions, to think. This tall old man was disgusting. But he was clearly no threat.

“Yes,” she called up the shaft. “I’m fine, Arrow Maker. Come down.”

She waited in silence for the few minutes it took her father — grunting, clumsy — to work his way down the rope from the forest floor. At last he dropped the last few feet to the Deck; he landed at a crouch, with his knife in one hand.

He was startled to find the two Underpeople there, but he seemed to take in the situation quickly. “Is she dead? Are you all right?”

“No, and yes.” She held up her blowpipe, apologetically. “I used this. Now, I don’t think I needed to. I — ”

“It doesn’t matter.”

The old Underman’s eyes were pale blue and watery; he seemed to be having trouble focusing on them. He pointed at the blowpipe. “You killed Constancy-of Purpose… with that?” His accent was strange, lilting, but quite comprehensible.

Spinner hesitated. “No…” She held out the pipe to him, but the Underman didn’t take it; he simply sat cradling his friend. “The pipe is bamboo. You give the darts an airtight seal inside the pipe with seed fibers. You get the poison from frogs, roasted on a spit, and — ”

“We’re sorry about your friend,” Arrow Maker said. “She will recover. And it was — unnecessary.”

The Underman looked defiant. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it damn well was.” He looked from one to the other. “What do you want?”

Spinner and her father looked at each other, uncertainly. At length Arrow Maker said, “We’ve an old man. Uvarov. He says he remembers Earth. And he says that the journey’s over — that the starship has arrived at its destination. And now we must travel to the Interface.” Maker looked at the Underman, hesitant, baffled. “Will you help us? Will you lead us to the Interface?” Then his expression hardened. “Or must we fight our way past you, as Uvarov predicts?”

The Underman stared at Maker. Somehow, Spinner thought, he seemed to be emerging from his paralysis and confusion. “Uvarov — Interface — I’ve no idea what you’re talking about…”

Then, unexpectedly, he said wonderingly, “But I’ve heard of Earth.”

The three of them stood in the cold light of the Lock, studying each other with fearful curiosity.

She descended deeper into the Sun, through the core-smothering flock of photino birds. The birds soared past and around her, tiny planets of dark matter racing through their tight Solar orbits.

The birds continually nudged toward or away from each other, like a horde of satellites maneuvering for docking. Many of the transient clusters which they formed — and swept by her, too fast to study properly — seemed immensely complex, and she stored away a succession of images. There had to be a reason for all this activity, she thought.

Some of the motion, on the fringe of the spherical flock, was simpler in pattern and easier to interpret.

Individual photino birds sailed in from beyond the flock, sweeping through the outer layers of the Sun on hyperbolic paths, and settled into the swarm of their orbiting cousins. Occasionally a bird would break away from the rest, and go soaring off on open trajectories to -

To where? Back to some diffuse ocean of dark matter beyond the Sun? Or to some other star?

And if so, why?

Patiently she watched the birds coming and going from their flock, letting the patterns build up in her head.

10

The hatch at the top of the Lock was jammed open, revealing a circle of luxuriant greenery. It was a window to another world. The howls of a troupe of some unimaginable animals echoed down into the metal caverns of Deck One.

Morrow stood at the base of the Lock shaft, trying to suppress the urge to run, to bury himself again in the routine rhythms of his everyday life.

Squatting around the rim of the upper hatch, peering down at Morrow, were four or five of the forest folk. They were all naked, their bare, smooth skins adorned with splashes of fruit-dye color, and they seemed impossibly young. Between them they were supporting a cradle of rope, and suspended in the cradle — descending slowly, shakily as the forest folk paid out lengths of rope — was Garry Uvarov.

The head of the extraordinary ancient protruded from a mass of thick blankets. Through the blankets Morrow could make out the chunky, mechanical box-shape of the mobile chair which sustained Uvarov, so that Uvarov looked nearly inhuman as if he had been merged with his chair, a bizarre, wizened cyborg.

The girl with the spectacles — Spinner-of-Rope — came to stand beside Morrow, at the bottom of the shaft. She wore a loose necklace of orchid-petals, and little else. Her head was at a level with Morrow’s elbow, and — now that he was growing used to her — her fierce crimson face paint looked almost comical. She touched his arm; her hand was delicate, small, impossibly light. “Don’t be afraid,” she said.

He was startled. “I’m not afraid. What is there to be afraid of? Why do you think I’m afraid? If I was afraid, would I be here helping you?”

“It’s the way you look. The way you’re standing.” She shrugged her bare shoulders. “Everything. Uvarov looks like — I don’t know; some huge larva — but he’s just a human. A very old human.”

“Actually I was thinking he looks like a kind of god. A half-human, half mechanical god. With you people as his attendants.”

She wrinkled her small nose and pushed her spectacles further up her face, smudging the paint on her cheeks; glaring up at him, she looked irritated. “Really. Well, we aren’t superstitious savages. As you Undermen think we are. Don’t you?”

“No, I — ”

“We know Uvarov is no god. He’s just a man — although a very ancient, strange and special man; a man who seems to remember what this ship was actually for.

“Morrow, I live in a tree and make things out of wood, and vine. You live — ” she waved a hand vaguely ” — in some boxy house somewhere, and make things out of metal and glass. But that’s the only difference between us. My people aren’t primitives, and we aren’t ignorant. We know that we’re all living inside a huge starship. Maybe we understand that better than you do, since we can actually see the sky.”

But that’s not the point. You and I are different, he thought, exasperated. More different than you can understand.

Spinner-of-Rope was a fifteen-year-old girl — lively, inquisitive, fearless, disrespectful. It had been five centuries since Morrow had been fifteen. Even then, he would have found Spinner a handful. Morrow suspected, wistfully, that Spinner was more alien to him than Garry Uvarov.

One of the forest folk walked up to them. Through a sparse mask of face paint the man smiled up at Morrow. “Is she giving you a hard time?”

Spinner snorted resentfully.

Morrow stared down at the newcomer, trying to place him. Damn it, all these little men look the same — He remembered; this was Arrow Maker, Spinner’s father. He made an effort to smile back. “No, no. Actually I think she was trying to comfort me. She was explaining I shouldn’t be frightened of old Uvarov.”

Uvarov’s chair bumped down on the surface of Deck One. Tree people clustered around Uvarov, loosening the ropes around the chair; the ropes were pulled back up through the hatch above them, snaking up like living things. Uvarov’s sightless eye sockets opened, and he growled instructions to his attendants.

Arrow Maker was watching Morrow’s face. “And do you fear Uvarov?”

Morrow became aware that he was pulling at his fingers, his motions tense, stabbing; he tried to be still. “No. Believe me, in my world, there are many AS failure cases just as — ah, startling — as Uvarov. Though perhaps no one quite so old.”

Spinner-of-Rope approached them. “Uvarov’s ready. So unless you want to stand here talking all day, I think we should get on…”

The little party formed up on Deck One. Morrow led the way, at a slow walking pace. Uvarov in his chair followed him, the chair’s hidden motor whirring noisily. Arrow Maker and Spinner flanked the chair, guiding the sightless Uvarov with gentle, wordless touches on his shoulder.

As the forest folk walked across the Deck, their feet padded softly on the worn metal; they left behind a trail of marks, imprints of forest dirt and sweat. Arrow Maker wore a bow and quiver, slung over his shoulder, and Spinner’s blowpipe dangled at her waist, obscure and deadly. Their bare, painted flesh made splashes of extraordinary color against the drab gray-brown shades of the Decks. Their eyes, peering through bright masks of paint, were wide with alert suspicion and wariness, an effect hardly softened by Spinner’s eyeglasses.

Morrow had managed to arrange an interview with Planner Milpitas. He had decided to restrict this venture into the interior of the Decks — this first mixture of cultures in centuries of the ship’s two worlds — to just these three. He didn’t want to expose the society of the Decks to any more cultural stress than he had to.

They moved away from the open Lock, with its last glimpse of the forest, and entered the metal-walled environment typical of the Decks. Spinner’s gait, at first confident, became more hesitant; she seemed to lose some of her brashness, and turned pale under her face paint.

Morrow felt a certain relish. “What’s the matter with you? Nervous?”

She looked at him defiantly, swallowing hard. “Shouldn’t I be? Aren’t you?”

Arrow Maker began, “Spinner — ”

“But it’s not that.” She wrinkled up her round face, making her glasses slip on her nose. “It’s the stench. It’s everywhere. Oppressive, stale… Can’t you smell it?”

Morrow raised his face, vaguely alarmed. Even old Uvarov, blind, trapped in his chair, turned his face, dragging air through his ruin of a nose.

Morrow said, “I don’t understand…”

“Spinner.” Arrow Maker’s voice was patient. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong. That’s just — people. People, and metal, and machinery. It’s a different world down here; we’ll have to learn to accept it.”

Spinner looked briefly horrified. “Well, it’s disgusting. They should do something about it.”

Morrow felt exasperated and amused. “Do something? Like what?”

“Like plant a few trees.” Defiantly, she lifted the orchid garland around her neck and pressed it against her face, ostentatiously breathing in the petals’ scent.

Arrow Maker walked beside Morrow. “She does not mean to give offense,” he said seriously.

Morrow sighed. “Don’t worry about that. But… I’m an old man, Arrow Maker. Older than you can understand, perhaps.” He glanced sideways at the little man from the forest. Arrow Maker looked competent, practical — and his four-feet tall body, his bare feet and his painted face were utterly out of place in the sterile surroundings of Deck One. “I’m a bit more restless than most people down here. And I’ve had enough trouble over that. But, even so, I’m old. I can’t help but fear change — unpredictability — more than anything else. You people represent an enormous irruption into the Decks — almost an invasion. My life will never be the same. And that’s uncomfortable.”

Arrow Maker slowed. “Will you help us?” he asked levelly. “You said — ”

“Yes, I’ll help you. I won’t lose my nerve, Arrow Maker; I’ll keep my word. I’ve been aware for a long time that the way things are run, down here, isn’t logical. Maybe, by helping you — by helping Uvarov — I’ll be able to make sense of a little more of it. Or maybe not.” At least, he thought, now I understand what all those ratchets and loops of metal I’ve been making for so many decades are actually for. He grinned and ran a hand over his shaven head. “But I don’t quite know what’s going to come out of this. You’re so different.”

Arrow Maker smiled. “Then being fearful — cautious, at least — is the only rational response.”

“Unless you’re fifteen years old.”

“I heard that.” Spinner rejoined them; she punched Morrow, lightly, in the ribs; her small, hard fist sank into layers of body-fat, and he tried not to react to the sudden, small pain.

They descended a ramp, and passed down from Deck One and onto Deck Two, the first of the inhabited levels.

Morrow tried to see his world through the fresh eyes of the forest people. The drab, stained surfaces of the bulkheads above and below, the distant, slightly mist-shrouded, hull walls, all provided a frame around the world — regular, ordered, enclosed. Immense banners of green copper-stain disfigured one hull wall. Stair-ramps threaded between the Decks like hundred-yard-long traceries of spider-webs, and the elevator shafts were vertical pillars which pierced the levels, apparently supporting the metal sky. The rigid circular-geometry layout of Deck Two was easy to discern. Buildings — homes, factories, the Planners’ Temples — clustered obediently in the Deck’s neat sectors and segments.

Morrow felt embarrassed, obscurely depressed. His world was unimaginative, constricting — like the interior of some huge machine, he thought. And a battered, failing, aging machine at that.

They set off down a chord-way which ran directly to Milpitas’ Temple.

A woman came near them. Morrow knew her — she was called Perpetuation; she ran a shop in a poor part of Sector 4. She walked steadily along the way toward them, eyes downcast. She looked tired, Morrow thought; it must be her shift end.

Then she looked up, and saw the forest folk. Perpetuation slowed to a halt in the middle of the chord-way, her mouth hanging slack. Morrow saw beads of sweat break out over her scalp.

In his peripheral vision, Morrow saw Spinner-of-Rope reach for her blowpipe.

He raised a hand and tried to smile. “Perpetuation. Don’t be alarmed. We’re on our way to the Temple, to…”

He let his voice trail off. He could see Perpetuation wasn’t hearing him. In fact, she seemed to be having difficulty in believing the evidence of her own eyes; she kept looking past Morrow’s party, along the chord-way toward her home.

It was as if the forest party didn’t exist — couldn’t exist — for her.

She looked absurd. But she reminded Morrow, disturbingly, of his own first reaction to Spinner-of-Rope.

Perpetuation scurried off the path, ran around them, and continued on her way without looking back. Spinner seemed to relax. She slung her blowpipe over her shoulder once more.

“For the love of Life,” Morrow snapped at the girl, suddenly impatient, “you were in no danger from that poor woman. She was terrified. Couldn’t you see that?”

Spinner returned his stare, wide-eyed.

Uvarov turned up his blind face; Arrow Maker explained briefly what had happened. Uvarov barked laughter. “You are wrong, Morrow. Of course Spinner was in danger here. We all are.”

Arrow Maker, plodding beside Morrow, frowned. “I don’t understand. This place is strange, but I’ve seen no danger.”

Morrow said, “I agree. You’re under no threat here…”

Uvarov laughed. “You think not? Maker, try to remember this lesson. It might keep you alive a little longer. The most precious thing to a human being is a mind-set: more precious than one’s own life, even. Human history has taught us that lesson time and again, with its endless parade of wars — human sacrifices en masse — thousands of deaths over the most trivial of differences of religious interpretation.

“We do not fit into the mind-set of the people within these Decks. That poor woman walked around us, convincing herself we are not real! By our presence here — by our very existence, in fact — we are disturbing the mind-set of the people here… in particular, of those ancients who control this society.

“They may not even realize it themselves, but they will seek to destroy us. The lives of three or four strangers is a cheap price to pay for the preservation of a mind-set, believe me.”

“No,” Morrow said. “I can’t accept that. I don’t always agree with the Planners. But they aren’t killers.”

“You think not?” Uvarov laughed again. “The survivalists — your ‘Planners’ are psychotic. Of course. As I am. And you. We are a fundamentally flawed species. Most of humanity, for most of its history, has been driven by a series of mass psychotic delusions. The labels changed, but the nature of the delusions barely varied…”

Uvarov sighed. “We built this marvelous ship — we created Superet. We dreamed of saving the species itself. We launched, toward the stars and the future…

“But, unfortunately, we had to take the contents of our heads with us.”

Morrow recalled Perpetuation’s expression, as she had systematically shut out the existence of the forest folk. Maybe, he thought grimly, this was going to be even harder than he’d anticipated.

Lieserl remembered the first time she’d lost contact with the outside human worlds altogether. It had hurt her more than she’d expected.

She’d tested her systems; the telemetry link was still functioning, but input from the far end had simply ceased — quite abruptly, without warning.

Confused, baffled, resentful, she had withdrawn into herself for a while. If the humans who had engineered her, and dumped her into this alien place, had now decided to abandon her — well, so would she them…

Then, when she calmed down a little, she tried to figure out why the link had been broken.

From the clues provided by Michael Poole’s quixotic wormhole flight into the future, Superet had put together a sketchy chronology of man’s future history. Lieserl mapped her internal clocks against the Superet chronology.

When she first lost contact, already millennia had passed since her downloading into the Sun.

Earth was occupied, she’d found.

Humans had diffused out beyond the Solar System in their bulky, ponderous slower-than-light GUTships. It had been a time of optimism, of hope, of expansion into an unlimited future.

Then the first extra-Solar intelligence had been encountered, somewhere among the stars: the Squeem, a race of group-mind entities with a wide network of trading colonies.

Impossibly rapidly, the Squeem had overwhelmed human military capabilities and occupied Earth. The systematic exploitation of Solar resources — for the benefit of an alien power — was begun.

Sometimes, Lieserl speculated about why the dire warnings of Superet — based on Poole’s data — had failed to avert the very catastrophes, like the Squeem occupation, that Superet had predicted. Maybe there was an inevitability to history — maybe it simply wasn’t possible to avert the tide of events, no matter how disastrous.

But Lieserl couldn’t accept such a fatalistic view.

Probably the simple truth was that — by the time enough centuries had passed for the predictions of Superet to come true — those predictions simply weren’t accepted any more. The people who had actually encountered the Squeem must have been pioneers — traders, builders of new worlds. To them. Earth and its environs had been a remote legend. If they’d ever even heard of Superet, it would have been dismissed as a remote fringe group clinging fanatically to shards of dire prediction from the past, with no greater significance than astrologers or soothsayers.

But, Lieserl realized, Superet’s predictions had actually been right.

After the Squeem interregnum, contact with her had suddenly been restored.

She remembered how words and images had suddenly come pouring once more through the revived telemetry links. At first she had been terrified by this sudden irruption into her cetacean drifting through the Sun’s heart.

Her new capcom — ragged, undernourished, but endlessly enthusiastic — told her that the yoke of the Squeem had been cast off. Humans were free again, able to exploit themselves and their own resources as they saw fit. Not only that, Lieserl learned, the Squeem occupation had left humans with a legacy of high technology — a hyperdrive, a faster-than-light means of traveling between the stars.

Hyperdrive technology hadn’t originated with the Squeem, it was learned rapidly. They had acquired it from some other species, by fair means or foul; just as humanity had now “inherited” it.

The true progenitors, of much of the technology in the Galaxy, were known… at least from afar.

Xeelee.

The lost human colonies on the nearby stars were contacted and revitalized, and a new, explosive wave of expansion began, powered by the hyperdrive. Humans spread like an infection across the Galaxy, vigorous, optimistic once more.

Lieserl, drifting through her fantasy of Sun-clouds, watched all this from afar, bemused. Contact with her was maintained only fitfully; Lieserl with her wormhole technology was a relic — a bizarre artifact from the past, drifting slowly to some forgotten goal inside the Sun.

In the first few years after the overthrow of the Squeem, humans had prospered flourished, expanded. But Lieserl grew increasingly depressed as she fast forwarded through human history. The Universe beyond the Solar System seemed to be a place full of petty, uncreative races endlessly competing for Xeelee scraps. But maybe, she thought sourly, that made it a good arena for mankind.

Then — devastatingly — a war was fought, and lost, with another alien power: the Qax.

Earth was occupied again.

There were more birds joining the flock than leaving it, she realized slowly.

The birds joining the cloud came in from random directions. But there was a pattern to the paths of the departing birds: there was a steady flow of the outgoing birds in one direction, in the Sun’s equatorial plane, to some unknown destination.

The point was, more birds were arriving than departing. The cloud at the heart of the Sun was being grown. The birds were expanding the cloud deliberately.

She felt as if she were being dragged along a deductive chain, reluctantly, to a place she didn’t want to go. She found, absurdly, that she liked the birds; she didn’t want to think ill of them.

But she had to consider the possibility.

Was it really true? What if the birds knew what they were doing, to the Sun? Oh, the precise form of their intelligence — their awareness — didn’t matter. They might even be some form of group consciousness, like the Squeem. The key question was their intent.

Could the wildest speculations of Superet be, after all, correct? Did the birds represent some form of malevolent intelligence which intended to extinguish the Sun?

Were they smothering the Sun’s fusion fire by design?

And if so, why?

Brooding, she sank deeper into the flock, watching, correlating.

They reached the Superet Planners’ Temple in Sector 3.

The little party slowed. Arrow Maker and Spinner seemed to have coped well with the sights and sounds of their journey so far, but the glowing, tetrahedral mass of the Temple, looming above them, seemed to have awed them at last. Morrow found it hard to control his own nervousness. After all it was only a few shifts since his own last, painful, personal interview with Milpitas; and now, standing here, he wondered at his own temerity at coming back like this.

Garry Uvarov stirred in his cocoon of stained blanket, his sightless face questing. When he spoke his cheeks, paper-thin, rustled. “What’s going on? Why have we stopped?”

“We’ve arrived,” Morrow said. “This is the Planners’ Temple. And — ”

Uvarov snorted, cavernously. “Temple. Of course they’d call it that, Arrow Maker,” he snapped. “Tell me what you see.”

Arrow Maker, hesitantly, described the tetrahedral pyramid, its glowing-blue edges, the sheets of glimmering brown-gold stretched across the faces.

Uvarov’s head quivered; he seemed to be trying to nod. “An Interface mockup. These damned survivalists; always so full of themselves. Temple.” He twisted his head; Morrow, fascinated, could see the vertebrae of his neck, individually articulating. “Well? What are we waiting for?”

Morrow, his anxiety and nervousness tightening in his chest, moved forward toward the Temple.

“Milpitas? Milpitas?” Uvarov’s gaunt face showed some interest. “I knew a Milpitas: Serena Harvey Gallium Harvey Milpitas…”

“My grandmother,” Planner Milpitas said. He sat back in his chair and steepled his long fingers, a familiar gesture that Morrow watched, fascinated. “One of the original crew. She died a long time ago — ”

Uvarov’s chair rolled, restlessly, back and forth across Milpitas’ soft carpet; Arrow Maker, Morrow and Spinner were forced to crowd to the back of Milpitas’ small office to avoid Uvarov. “I know all that, damn it. I didn’t ask for her life history. I said I knew her. Glib tongue, she had, like all Martians.”

Milpitas, behind his desk, regarded Uvarov. Morrow conceded with a certain respect that the Planner’s composure, his certainty, hadn’t been ruffled at all by the irruption into his ordered world of these painted savages, this gaunt ancient from the days of the launch itself.

The Planner asked, “Why have you come here?”

“Because you wouldn’t come out to meet me,” Uvarov growled. “You arrogant bastard. I should have — ”

“But why,” Milpitas pressed with patient distaste, “did you wish to meet me at all?” Now he let his cold eyes flicker over the silent forest folk. “Why not stay in your jungle, climbing trees with your friends here?”

Morrow heard Spinner-of-Rope growl under her breath.

Uvarov’s nostrils flared, the papery skin stretching. “I won’t be spoken to like that by the likes of you. Who’s in charge here?”

“I am,” Milpitas said calmly. “Now answer my question.”

Garry Uvarov raised his face; in the subdued, sourceless light of Milpitas’ office his eye sockets looked infinitely deep. “You people were always the same.”

Milpitas looked amused. “What people, exactly?”

“You survivalists. Your blessed grandmother and the rest of the crew she fell in with, who thought they were the only ones, the sacred guardians of Superet’s mission. Always trying to control everybody else, to fit us all into your damn hierarchies.”

“If you’ve come all this way to debate social structures, then let’s do so,” Milpitas said easily. “There are reasons for devising hierarchical societies — purposes for devising bureaucracies. Did you ever think of that, old man?” He waved a languid hand. “We’re confined here — obviously — within a finite environment. We have limited resources. We’ve no means of obtaining more resources. So we need control. We must plan. We need consistency of behavior: a regulated society designed to maximize efficiency until the greater goal is reached. And a bureaucracy is the best way of — ”

“Power!” Uvarov’s voice was a sudden rant.

His head jerked forward on its stem of neck. “You’ve built walls around the world, walls around people. Consistency of behavior my arse. We’re talking about power, Milpitas. That’s all. The power to flatten and control — to impose illiteracy — even to remove the right to reproduce. You’re damned inhuman; you people always were. And — ”

Milpitas laughed; he seemed completely unperturbed. “How long have you been isolated up there in the trees, Dr. Uvarov? How many centuries? And have you cherished this bitterness all that time?”

“You’re obsessed with control. You survivalists… With your perverted vision of the Superet goal, your exclusive access to the truth.”

Milpitas’ laughter faded, and a cold light came into his eyes. “I know your history, Dr. Uvarov. It’s familiar enough. Your rejection of AS treatment, your bizarre experiment to breed longevity into your people — your victims, I should say… And you talk to me of obsession. Of control. You dare talk to me of these things…”

In his brief time with the forest folk, Morrow had learned of Uvarov’s eugenic ambitions.

Uvarov had rejected AS treatment — and any artificial means — as the way to immortality. To improve the stock, it was necessary to change the species, he argued.

Humans were governed by their genes. They — and every other living thing — were machines, designed by the genes to ensure their own — the genes’ — survival. Genes gave their hosts life — and killed them.

Genes which killed their hosts tended to be removed from the gene pool. Thus, a gene which killed young bodies would have no way of being passed on to offspring. But a gene which killed old bodies after they’d reproduced could survive.

So, perversely, lethal genes in older bodies could propagate.

Uvarov had come to understand that senile decay was simply the outcome of late acting lethal genes, which could never be selected out of the gene pool by breeding among the young.

After two centuries of flight, Garry Uvarov had determined to improve the stock of humanity the starship was carrying to the future. AS treatment used nanobotic techniques to eliminate aging effects directly, at the biochemical level, but did not challenge the genes directly.

Even before AS treatment had started to fail him, Uvarov had declared war on the lethal genes which were killing him.

He and his followers had occupied the forest Deck, effectively sealing it off. He sent his people into the forest and told them that they would have a simple life: take nourishment from the forest, make simple tools. AS treatment was abandoned, and within a few years the forest floor and canopy were alive with the voices of children.

Then, Uvarov banned any reproduction before the age of forty.

Uvarov had enforced his rule with iron discipline; stalking through the forest, or ascending, grim-faced, into the canopy, Uvarov and a team of close followers had performed several quick, neat abortions.

After some generations of this, he pushed the conception limit up to forty-five. Then fifty.

The population in the forest dipped, but slowly started to recover. And, gradually, the lethal genes were eliminated from the gene pool.

Over time, some contact — a kind of implicit trade — opened up between the inhabitants of the lower levels and the jungle folk. But there was no incursion from below, no will to break open Deck Zero. And so, with iron determination, Uvarov enforced his huge experiment, century after century.

Arrow Maker and Spinner-of-Rope — face-painted, young-old pygmies — were the extraordinary result.

Milpitas listened, apparently bemused, as Uvarov ranted. “When I started this work the average lifespan, without AS, was about a hundred. Now we have individuals over two hundred and fifty years old…” Spittle looped across his toothless mouth. “A thousand AS years isn’t enough. Ten thousand wouldn’t suffice. I’m talking about changing the nature of the species, man…”

Milpitas laughed at him. “Was there ever a more obsessive control of any unfortunate population than that? To deny the benefits of AS to so many generations — ” The Planner shook his bare, scarred head. “To waste so much human potential, so many ‘mute, inglorious Miltons’…”

“I’m transforming the species itself,” Uvarov hissed. “And it’s working, damn you. Arrow Maker, here — ” he cast about vaguely ” — is eighty years old. Eighty. Look at him. By successively breeding out the lethal genes, I’ve — ”

“If your program was so laudable, then why did you feel it necessary to barricade yourself into the forest Deck?”

Morrow, helpless, felt as if he had wandered into an old, worn-out argument. He remembered his last interview with Milpitas, in which Milpitas had — calmly and consistently — denied the reality of the society above Deck One: a society whose independent existence had been obvious long before Arrow Maker and the others came firing darts down through the opened hatches of the Locks. And now even when confronted with Uvarov and these painted primitives — Milpitas seemed unable to break away from his own restricted world-view.

Uvarov was noisy, of alien appearance, visibly half-insane, and locked inside a partial, incomplete — yet utterly inflexible — mind-set. Milpitas, by contrast, was calm, his manner and speech ordered, controlled. And yet, Morrow reflected uneasily, Milpitas was, in his way, just as rigid in his thinking, just as willing to reject the evidence of his senses.

We’re a frozen society, Morrow thought gloomily. Intellectually dead. Maybe Uvarov is right about mind-sets. Perhaps we’re all insane, after this long flight. And yet — and yet, if Uvarov is correct about the end of the flight then perhaps we can’t afford to remain this way much longer.

With a sense of desperation, he turned to Milpitas. “You must listen to him. The situation’s changed, Planner. The ship — ”

Milpitas ignored him. He looked weary. “I’m growing bored with this. I will ask my question once more. And then you will leave. All of you.

“Uvarov, why have you come here?”

Uvarov wheeled his chair forward; Morrow heard a dull thud as the chair frame collided softly with Milpitas’ desk. “Survivalist,” he said, “the journey is over.”

Milpitas frowned. “What journey?”

“The flight of the Great Northern. Our odyssey through rime, and space, to the end of history.” His ruined face twisted. “I hate to admit it, but our factionalism serves no more purpose. Now, we have to work together — to reach the wormhole Interface, and — ”

“Why,” Milpitas asked steadily, “do you believe the journey is over?”

“Because I’ve seen the stars.”

“Impossible,” Milpitas snapped. “Your eyes are gone. You’re insane, Uvarov.”

“My people — ” Uvarov’s voice dried to a croak. Spinner-of-Rope stepped forward, took a wooden bowl of water from a rack within the body of the chair, and allowed a little of the fluid to trickle into Uvarov’s cavern of a mouth.

“My people are my eyes,” Uvarov said, gasping. “Arrow Maker climbed the tallest tree and studied the stars. I know, Milpitas. And I understand.”

Milpitas’ eyes narrowed. “You understand nothing.” He glanced, briefly and dismissively, at Arrow Maker, who returned his look with cool calculation. “I’ve no idea what this — person — saw, when he climbed his tree. But I know you’re wrong, Uvarov. We’ve nothing to discuss.”

“But the stars — don’t you see, Milpitas? There was no starbow. The relativistic phase of the flight must be over…”

Milpitas smiled thinly. “Even now, through the fog that has swamped your intellect, you’ll probably concede that one great strength of the bureaucracies you despise so much is record-keeping.

“Uvarov, we keep good records. And we know that you’re wrong. After all this time there’s some uncertainty, but we know that the thousand-year flight has at least half a century to run.”

Something stirred in Morrow’s heart at that. Somehow, he suspected, he’d never quite believed Uvarov’s pronouncement — but the authority of a Planner was something else. Just fifty years…

“You’re a damn fool,” Uvarov railed; his chair jerked back and forth, displaying his agitation.

Milpitas said coolly, “No doubt. But we’ll cope with journey’s end when it comes. Now I want you out of my office, old man. I have more than enough work to do without — ”

Morrow couldn’t help but come forward. “Planner. Is that all you have to say? The first contact between the Decks for hundreds of years — ”

“And the last, if I’ve anything to do with it.” Milpitas raised his face to Morrow; his remodelled flesh was like a sculpture, Morrow thought abstractedly, a thing of cold, hard planes and edges. “Get them out of here, Morrow. Take them back to their jungle world.”

“Was I wrong to bring them here?”

“Get them out.” Tension showed in Milpitas’ voice, and the prominence of the muscles in his neck. “Get them out.”

She wondered how she must appear to these photino creatures.

They would find it as difficult to perceive baryonic matter as she, a baryonic creature, found it to see them. Perhaps the birds saw a pale tetrahedron, the faint dark-matter shadow of the exotic matter Interface framework which formed the basis of her being. Perhaps they caught some dim sense of the wormhole itself, the throat of space and time through which she pumped away the heat which would otherwise destroy her.

The old theories had predicted dark-matter particles colliding with the swarming protons of the Solar core, absorbing a little of their energy and so transporting heat out from the fusing heart. This was how, it was thought, dark matter cooled the Sun.

She saw now that these notions had been right in essence, but too crude. The birds absorbed Solar heat energy. They fed on interactions with protons in the plasma. Incorporating energy from photino-proton interactions within their structures, the birds grew, and spiraled out from the hotter, denser heart of the Sun, taking the heat energy with them.

The ancient theorists had envisaged a particle-based physical process to extract core heat, and so suppress the fusion processes there. The truth was, the birds fed on the Sun’s heat.

And, by feeding — like unwise parasites — they would eventually kill their host.

Unwise — unless, of course, that had been the intention all along.

Lieserl had learned about the Qax.

The Qax had originated as clusters of turbulent cells in the seas of a young planet. Because there were so few of them the Qax weren’t naturally warlike — individual life was far too precious to them. They were natural traders; the Qax worked with each other like independent corporations, in perfect competition.

They had occupied Earth simply because it was so easy — because they could.

The only law governing the squabbling junior races of the Galaxy was, Lieserl realized, the iron rule of economics. The Qax enslaved mankind simply because it was an economically valid proposition.

They had to learn the techniques of oppression from humans themselves. Fortunately for the Qax, human history wasn’t short of object lessons.

The wormhole station maintaining contact with Lieserl was abandoned, once again, during the Qax occupation.

Finally the Qax were overthrown. The details hadn’t been clear to Lieserl; it was something to do with a man named Jim Bolder, and an unlikely flight in a stolen Xeelee derelict craft, to the site of the Xeelee’s greatest project: the Ring…

This was the first time Lieserl had heard of the Ring.

After the overthrow, once more humans returned to the Sun, and restored contact with the aging, increasingly incongruous artifact that contained Lieserl.

This time, Lieserl was shocked by the humans who greeted her.

The Qax, during the occupation, had withdrawn Anti-Senescence technology. Death, illness, had returned to the worlds of mankind. It hadn’t taken long for toil and disease to erase most of the old immortals — some of whom had still remembered the days before the Squeem, even — and, within a few generations, humans had forgotten much of their past.

The discontinuity in human culture after the Qax was immeasurably greater than that arising from the Squeem occupation. The new people who emerged from the Qax era — and who now peered out of sketchy images at Lieserl in her cocoon of Solar plasma — seemed alien to her, with their shaven heads and gaunt, fanatical expressions.

Expansion had begun again, but this time fueled by a hard-edged determination. Never again would humanity be made to serve some alien power. Lieserl in her whale-dream, watching centuries flicker by in fragments of image and speech, saw humans erupt out of their systems once more. A new period began — a period called the Assimilation.

During the Assimilation, humans — aggressively and deliberately — absorbed the resources and technologies of other species.

Human culture evolved rapidly in this period. The link with Lieserl was maintained, but with increasingly long interruptions. The motivation of these remote humans seemed to be a brand of hostile curiosity; she saw only calculation in the faces presented to her. She was seen, she suspected, only as another resource to be exploited for the continuing, endless expansion of mankind.

Soon — astonishingly quickly — humans became the dominant of the junior races. Humanity’s growth in power and influence grew exponentially.

At last, only the Xeelee themselves were more potent than mankind… And the legend of the Xeelee’s achievements — the construction material, the manipulation of space and time, the Ring itself — grew into a deep-rooted mythology.

Then, for the last time, her wormhole telemetry link was shut down.

Drifting through her endless, unchanging ocean of plasma, she felt a distant twinge of regret — a feeling that soon dispersed into the peaceful, numb silence around her.

Humans had become alien to her. She was better off without them.

The birds must have some lifecycle, she thought; a circle of birth and life and death, much like every baryonic creature. Individual photino birds moved past her too rapidly to follow; but still, she studied them carefully, and was rewarded with glimpses — she thought — of growth.

Eventually she saw a bird reproduce.

She could see there was something unusual about this bird, even as it approached. The bird was fat, swollen with proton heat-energy. It seemed somehow more solid — more real, to Lieserl’s baryonic senses — than its neighbors.

The bird shuddered — once, twice — its lenticular rim quivering. She almost felt some empathy with the creature; it seemed in agony.

Abruptly — startling Lieserl — the bird shot away from its orbital path. It hovered for a moment — then it hurtled down into the heat-rich core of the Sun once more. Lieserl’s processors told her that the bird seemed a little less massive than before.

And it had left something behind.

Lieserl enhanced her senses as far as they would go. The mother-bird had left behind a copy of herself — a ghostly copy, rendered in clumps of higher density in the plasma proton-electron mix. It was a three-dimensional image of the mother, in baryonic matter. Within fractions of a second the clumps had started to disperse — but not before more photinos had clustered around the complex pattern of baryonic matter, rapidly plating over its internal structure.

The whole process took less than a second. At the end of it, a new photino bird, sleek and small, moved away from the site of its birth; the last traces of the higher-density baryonic material left behind by the mother bird drifted away.

Lieserl ran the image sequence over and over. As a method of reproduction, it was a long way from any Earth-bound form — even cloning. It was more like making a straight copy — an imprint from a three-dimensional mold, mediated by baryonic matter.

The newborn must be an almost exact copy of its parent — more exact than any clone, even. Presumably it carried a copy of its parent’s memories — even, perhaps, of its awareness…

And, presumably, a copy too of the generation before that — and before that, and…

Lieserl smiled. Each photino child must carry within it the soul of all of its grandmothers, a deep tree of awareness reaching right back to the dawn of the species.

And all mediated by baryonic matter, she thought wonderingly. The birds depended on the relative transparency of dark and baryonic matter to take their detailed, three-dimensional copies of themselves.

But this meant, she realized, that the photino birds could only breed in places where they could find high densities of baryonic matter. They could only breed in the hearts of stars.

She replayed the birth images, over and over.

There was something graceful, immensely appealing, about the photino birds, and she found herself warming to them. Spiritually she felt much closer to the birds, now, than to the hard-eyed humans of the Assimilation, beyond the Solar ocean.

She hoped her theory — that the birds were deliberately destroying the Sun — was wrong.

The return journey seemed much longer. Morrow felt angry, disappointed, weary. “I can’t understand how Milpitas reacted.” He shook his head. “It’s as if he didn’t even see you people…”

“Oh, I understand.” Uvarov twisted his head. “I understand. We are all too old, you see. In a way Milpitas was right about me; after all I share some of these flaws myself.” Uvarov’s voice, while still distorted by age, was calmer, more rational than at any point during the interview with Milpitas, Morrow thought.

Uvarov went on, “But at least I can recognize my limitations — the tunnel-vision of my age and condition. And, by recognizing it, deal with it.”

Spinner-of-Rope had been leading the way up the hundred-yard ramp to Deck One. Now, as she neared the top, she slowed. Her hand dropped, seemingly automatically, to her blowpipe and the little sack of feathered darts at her waist.

“What is it?” Morrow asked drily. “More problems with human body odor?”

She turned, her eyes huge behind her spectacles. “Not that. But something… Something’s wrong.”

Arrow Maker raised his face. “I can smell it, too.”

“Describe,” Uvarov snapped.

“Sharp. Smoky. A little like fire, but more intense…”

Uvarov grunted. He sounded somehow satisfied. “Cordite, probably.”

Arrow Maker looked blank. “What?”

They reached the top of the ramp. Hastily, with both forest people bearing their weapons in their hands, they made for the Lock down which Uvarov had been carried.

As they approached the Lock, they slowed, almost as if synchronized. The three of them — Arrow Maker, Morrow and Spinner — stood and stared at the Lock.

Uvarov twisted his face to left and right. “Tell me what’s wrong. It’s the Lock, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” Morrow stepped forward cautiously. “Yes, it’s the Lock.” The cylinder of metal had been burst open, somewhere near its center; bits of its fabric, twisted, scorched, none larger than his hand, lay scattered across the Deck surface. There was a stink of smoke and fire — presumably Uvarov’s cordite.

Arrow Maker stood clutching his bow, open-mouthed, impotent. Spinner ran off toward the next Lock, her bare feet padding against the metal floor.

Uvarov nodded. “Simple and effective. We should have expected this.”

Morrow bent to pick up a piece of hull metal; but the twisted, scorched fragment was still hot, and he withdrew his fingers hastily.

Spinner came running back. She looked breathless, wide-eyed and very young; she stood close to her father and clutched his arm. “The next Lock’s been blown out as well. I think they all have. The Locks are impassable. We can’t get home.”

Uvarov whispered, “We should check. But I am sure she is right.”

Morrow slammed his fist into his palm. “Why? I just don’t understand. Why this destruction — this waste?”

“I told you why,” Uvarov said evenly. “The existence of the upper level was an unacceptable challenge to the mindset of Milpitas and the rest of your damn Planners. I doubt if they will have done any damage to the forest Deck itself. Sealing it off — sealing it away from themselves, apparently forever — should do the trick just as well.”

“But that’s insane,” Morrow protested.

Uvarov hissed, “No one ever said it wasn’t. We’re human beings. What do you expect?”

Arrow Maker paced about the floor. Morrow became aware, nervously, of the muscles in the back of the little man which flexed, angrily; Maker’s face paint flared. “Whether it was intended or not, we’re trapped here. We’re in real danger. Now, what in Lethe are we going to do?”

Morrow’s fear seemed to have been burned out of him by his anger at the foolishness, the wastefulness of the destruction of the Locks. “I’ll help you. I’ll not abandon you. I’ll take you to my home — I live alone; you can hide there. Later, perhaps we can find some way to open up a Lock again, and — ”

Arrow Maker looked grateful; but before he could speak Uvarov wheeled forward.

“No. We won’t be going back to the forest.”

Arrow Maker said, “But, Uvarov — ”

“Nothing’s changed.” Uvarov turned his blind face from side to side. “Don’t you see that? Arrow Maker, you saw the stars yourself. The ship’s journey is over. And we have to go on.”

Spinner clutched at her father’s arm. “Go on? Where?”

“Regardless of the reaction of these damn fool survivalists, we will continue. Down through these Decks, and onwards… On to the Interface itself.”

Arrow Maker, Spinner and Morrow exchanged stricken glances.

Uvarov tilted back his head, exposing his bony throat. “We’ve traveled across five million years, Arrow Maker,” he whispered. “Five million years… Now it’s time to go home.”

11

She shivered. Suddenly, she felt oddly cold.

Cold? No. Come on, Lieserl, think.

Sometimes her Virtual-human illusory form was a hindrance; it caused her to anthropomorphize genuine experiences.

Something had happened to her just now; somehow her environment had changed. How?

There it came again — that deep, inner stab of illusory cold.

She looked down at herself.

A ghost-form — a photino bird — emerged from her Virtual stomach, and flew away on its orbit around the Sun. Another came through her legs; still more through her arms and chest — and at last, one bird flew through her head, the place where she resided. Her cold feeling was a reaction to the slivers of energy the birds took away from her as they passed through.

Before, the photino birds had avoided her; presumably residually aware of her, they’d adjusted their trajectories to sweep around her. Now, though, they seemed to be doing quite the opposite. They seemed to be aiming at her, veering from their paths so that they deliberately passed through her.

She felt like screaming — struggling, beating away these creatures with her fists.

Much good that will do. She forced herself to remain still, to observe, to wait.

Behind her the birds seemed to be gathering into a new formation: a cone with herself at the apex, a cone into which they streamed.

Could they damage me? Kill me, even?

Well, could they? Dark matter could interact with baryonic to a limited extent. If their density, around her, grew high enough — if the rate of interaction between the birds and the particles which comprised her grew high enough — then, she realized, the birds could do anything.

And there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it; embedded in this mush of plasma, she could never get away from them in time.

She felt as if a hard, needle rain were sleeting through her. It was uncomfortable — tingling — but not truly painful, she realized slowly.

Maybe they didn’t mean to destroy her, she wondered drowsily. Maybe — maybe they were trying to understand her…

She held out her arms and submitted herself to inspection by the photino birds.

They formed into a rough column — Arrow Maker leading, then Uvarov, followed by Morrow and Spinner-of-Rope, with Spinner occasionally boosting Uvarov’s chair.

Morrow stepped over the ramp’s shallow lip and began the gentle, hundred-yard descent back into the comparative brightness and warmth of Deck Two.

“Listen to me,” Garry Uvarov rasped. “We’re at the top of the lifedome. We have to get to the bottom of the dome, about a mile below us. Then we’ll need to find a pod and traverse half the length of the Northern’s spine, toward the drive unit; and that’s where we’ll find the Interface. Got that?”

Most of this was unimaginable to Morrow. He tried to concentrate on the part he understood. “What do you mean by the bottom of the lifedome? Deck Four?”

A bark of laughter from Uvarov. “No; I mean the loading bay. Below Deck Fifteen.”

Morrow felt something cringe within him. I’m too old for this… “But, Uvarov, there is nothing below Deck Four — ”

“Don’t be so damn stupid, man.”

“…I mean, nothing inhabited. Even Deck Four is just used as a mine.” He tried to imagine descending below the gloomy, cavernous Deck in which he’d spent so much of his working life. It might be airless down there. And it would certainly be dark. And -

There was a whisper of air past his ear, a clatter as something hit the metal of the ramp behind him.

Arrow Maker froze, reaching for his bow instantly. Spinner hauled Uvarov’s chair to a halt, and the old doctor stared around with his sightless eyes.

“What was that?” Uvarov snapped.

Morrow took a couple of steps back up the ramp and searched the surface. Soon he spied the glint of metal. He bent to pick up the little artifact.

It was a piton, he realized — a simple design he’d turned out hundreds of times himself, in the workshops of Deck Four, for the trade with the forest folk. Perhaps Arrow Maker and Spinner had pitons just like this in their kit even now.

But this piton seemed to have been sharpened; its point gleamed with rough, planed surfaces…

There was another whisper of air.

Spinner cried out. She clutched her left arm and bent forward, tumbling slowly to the Deck.

Arrow Maker bent over her. “Spinner? Spinner?”

Spinner held her left arm stiff against her body, and blood was seeping out through the fingers she’d clamped over her flesh.

Arrow Maker prized his daughter’s hand away from her arm. Blood trickled down her bare flesh, from a neat, clean-looking puncture; a metal hook protruded from the center of the puncture. Spinner showed no pain, or fear; her expression was empty, perhaps with a trace of dull surprise showing in the eyes behind her spectacles.

Without hesitation Maker grabbed the hook, spread his fingers around its base across Spinner’s flesh, and pulled.

The device slid out neatly. Spinner murmured, her face pale beneath its lurid paint.

Arrow Maker held up the blood-stained artifact. It was another piton. “Someone’s shooting at us,” he said evenly.

“Shooting?” Uvarov turned his blind face toward Morrow. “What’s this, paper pusher? Is Superet arming you all now?”

Morrow took a few steps down the ramp, further into the light of Deck Two, and peered down.

Four people were climbing the ramp toward him: two women and two men, in drab, startlingly ordinary work uniforms. They looked scared, even bewildered; but their advance was steady and measured. They were pointing devices at his chest. He squinted to see the machines: strips of gleaming metal, bent into curves by lengths of cable.

“I don’t believe it,” he whispered. “Cross-bows. They’re carrying cross-bows.”

The weapons were obviously of scavenged interior partition material. They must have been constructed in the Deck Four workshops — perhaps mere yards from the spot where Morrow had whiled away decades making climbing rings, ratchets, spectacle frames and bits of cutlery for forest folk he’d never expected to meet.

One of the four assailants, a woman, lifted her bow and began to adjust it, increasing its tension by working a small lever. She drew a piton from her tunic pocket and fitted it into a slot on top of the bow. She raised the bow and sighted along it, at his chest.

Morrow watched, fascinated. He thought he recognized this woman. Doesn’t she work in a hydroponics processor in Segment 2? And -

A compact mass crashed into his legs. His body was flung to the hard, ridged surface of the ramp, his cheek colliding with the floor with astonishing force.

Another sigh of air over his head; again he heard the clatter of a sharpened piton hitting metal.

Arrow Maker’s hand was on his back, pinning him against the ridged ramp surface. “You’d better damn well wake up, if you want to stay alive,” the forest man hissed. “Come on. Back up the ramp. Spinner, help Uvarov.”

Spinner-of-Rope, blood still coating her lower arm, clambered up behind Uvarov’s chair and began to haul it backwards up the ramp.

Morrow sat up cautiously. His cheek ached, his left side — where he’d landed was sore, and the ramp felt astonishingly hard beneath his legs. The sparks of pain were like fragments of a sensory explosion. He realized slowly that he hadn’t been in a fight — or any kind of violent physical situation — since he’d been a young man.

Arrow Maker’s hand grabbed at his collar and hauled him backwards, flat against the ramp. “Keep down, damn it. Watch me. Do what I do.”

Morrow, with an effort, turned on his belly; the ramp ridges dug painfully into the soft flesh over his hip.

Arrow Maker worked rapidly up the ramp. He was small, compact, determined; his bare limbs squirmed across the metal like independent animals. Beyond him, Spinner had already pulled Uvarov out of the line of sight, into the darkness of Deck One.

Morrow tried to copy Arrow Maker’s motion, but his clothes snagged on rough edges on the ramp, and the coarse surface rubbed at his palms.

Another piton whispered over his head.

He clambered to a crawling position and — ignoring the agony of kneecaps rolling over ridges in the surface — he scurried up the few yards of the ramp and over its lip.

Arrow Maker tore a strip from Uvarov’s blanket and briskly wrapped it around his daughter’s wounded arm. Maker said, “They’re coming up the ramp. They’ll be here in less than a minute. Which way, Morrow?”

Morrow rolled onto his backside and sat with his legs splayed. He couldn’t quite believe what had happened to him, all in the space of less than a minute. “Weapons,” he said. “How could they have made them so quickly? And — ”

From the gloom of Deck One he heard Uvarov’s barked laughter. “Are you really so naive?”

Arrow Maker finished his makeshift bandage. “Morrow. Which way do we go?”

“The elevator shafts,” Uvarov croaked from the darkness. “They’ll be covering all the ramps. The shafts are our only chance. And the shafts cut right through the Decks, all the way to the base of the dome…”

“But the shafts are disused,” Morrow said, frowning. The shafts had been shut down after the abandonment of the lower Decks, centuries before.

Uvarov grimaced. “Then we’ll have to climb, won’t we?”

Morrow could hear the slow, cautious footsteps of their four assailants as they came up the ramp.

The Decks weren’t a very big world, and he’d been alive for a long time. He must know these people.

And they were coming to kill him. If someone else had had the misfortune to be on Deck One when Maker and Spinner first stuck their heads through the hatch, then maybe he, Morrow, would now be in this hunting party, with crossbows and bolts of scavenged hull-metal…

A shadow fell across him. He looked up into the eyes of the woman who worked in the Segment 2 hydroponics. She held a gleaming cross-bow bolt pointed at his face.

There was a whoosh of air.

The woman raised her hand to her face, the palm meeting her cheek with a dull clap. She fell backwards and rolled a few paces down the ramp. The cross-bow dropped from her loosening fingers and clattered to the Deck.

Beyond the fallen woman Morrow caught a brief impression of the other three Deck folk scrambling back down the ramp.

Spinner-of-Rope lowered her blowpipe; beneath her spectacles, her lips were trembling.

“It’s all right, Spinner-of-Rope,” Maker said urgently. “You did the right thing.”

“Morrow,” Uvarov said. “Show them the way.”

Morrow pushed himself to his feet and stumbled away from the ramp.

The elevator shaft was a cylinder of metal ten yards across; it rose from floor to ceiling, a hundred yards above them.

Spinner-of-Rope, blood soaking through her dark bandage, leaned against the shaft. She looked tired, scared, subdued. She really is just a kid, Morrow thought.

But she said defiantly, “You Undermen aren’t used to fighting, are you? Maybe those four weren’t expecting us to fight back. So they’ll be scared. Cautious. It will slow them down — ”

“But not stop them,” Arrow Maker murmured. He was running his hand over the surface of the shaft, probing at small indentations in its surface. “So we haven’t much time… Morrow, how do we get into — Oh.”

In response to Arrow Maker’s random jabs, a panel slid backwards and sideways. A round-edged doorway into the shaft was opened up, about as tall as Morrow and towering over the forest folk.

Within the shaft, there was only darkness.

Arrow Maker stuck his head inside the shaft, and peered up and down its length. “There are rungs on the inner surface. It’s like a ladder. Good. It will be easy to climb. And — ”

Spinner touched his arm. “What about Uvarov?”

Arrow Maker turned to the old doctor, his face creasing with concern.

Morrow looked with dismay at the gaping shaft. “We’ll never be able to carry that chair, not down a ladder — ”

“Then carry me.” Uvarov’s ruined, crumpled face was deep in shadow as he lifted his head to them. “Forget the chair, damn it. Carry me.”

Morrow heard footsteps, echoing from the bare walls of Deck One. “There’s no time,” he said to Arrow Maker. “We have to leave him. We can’t — ”

Maker looked up at him, his face drawn and haughty beneath its gaudy paint. Then he turned away. “Spinner, give me a hand. Get his blanket off.”

The girl took hold of the top of the black blanket and gently drew it back. Uvarov’s body was revealed: wasted, angularly bony, dressed in a silvery coverall through which Morrow could clearly see the bulge of ribs and pelvis. There were lumps under Uvarov’s tunic: perhaps colostomy bags or similar medical aids. Although he must have been as tall as Morrow, Uvarov’s body looked as if it massed no more than a child’s. One hand rested on Uvarov’s lap, swaying through a pendular tremble with a period of a second or so, and the other was wrapped around a simple joystick which — Morrow presumed — controlled the chair.

Arrow Maker took Uvarov’s wrist and gently pulled his hand away from the joystick; the hand stayed curled, like a claw. Then Maker leaned forward, tucked his head into Uvarov’s chest, and straightened up, lifting Uvarov neatly out of his chair and settling him over Maker’s shoulder. As Arrow Maker stood there Uvarov’s slippered feet dangled against the floor, with his knees almost bent.

Uvarov submitted to all this passively, without comment or complaint; Morrow, watching them, had the feeling that Arrow Maker was accustomed to handling Uvarov like this — perhaps he served the old doctor as some kind of basic nurse.

As he studied the tough little man, almost obscured by his dangling human load. Morrow felt a pang of shame.

Spinner-of-Rope picked up Uvarov’s blanket and slung it over her shoulder. “Let’s go,” she said anxiously.

“You lead,” Arrow Maker said.

Spinner took hold of the frame of the open hatch and vaulted neatly into the shaft. She twisted, grabbed onto the rungs beneath the door frame, and clambered down out of sight.

“Now you, Morrow,” Arrow Maker hissed.

Morrow put his hands, now sweating profusely, on the door frame. Damn it, he was five hundred years older than Spinner. And even when he’d been fifteen he’d never been lithe…

“Move!”

He raised one leg and hoisted it over the lip of the door frame. The frame dug into his crotch. He tried to bring his second leg over — and almost lost his grip in the process. He clung to the frame with both hands, feeling as if the entire surface of his skin was drenched in cold sweat.

He tried again, more slowly, and this time managed to get both legs over. For a moment he sat there, feet dangling over a drop whose depth was hidden by darkness.

If the shaft was open all the way to the bottom of the life-dome, there was a mile’s drop below him.

He thought, briefly, of climbing back out of the shaft. Could he really face this? He could try surrendering, after all… But, oddly, it was the thought of the consequent shame in the face of Arrow Maker and Spinner made that option impossible.

He reached out and down, cautiously, with his right foot. It seemed a long way to the first rung, but at last he caught it with his heel. The rung felt fat and reassuringly solid. He got both feet onto the rung and straightened up. Then, still being minutely careful, he turned around, letting the soles of his feet swivel over the metal rung.

He bent his knees and reached out for the next rung. It was about eighteen inches below the first. Once he’d gone down two or three rungs and he started to settle into a routine, with both hands and feet fixed to the rungs, the going got easier -

Until he suddenly became aware that he was climbing down into the dark.

He couldn’t see a damn thing, not even the metal shaft surface before his face, or the whiteness of his own hands on the rungs.

He stopped dead and looked up, suddenly desperate even for the dim light of Deck One. Instantly he felt warm, bare feet trampling over the backs of his hands on the rungs, and the clumsy pressure of Arrow Maker’s legs on his shoulders and head; something clattered against his back — Uvarov’s feet, presumably.

Spinner’s voice drifted up from the shaft. “What’s going on?”

“What in Lethe are you doing?” Arrow Maker hissed.

“I’m sorry. It was dark. I — ”

“Morrow, your friends are going to reach the shaft any moment — ”

Something metallic rattled from the walls of the shaft, the resounding bounces coming further apart as it fell.

Uvarov’s voice sounded from the region of Maker’s upper legs. “Correction,” he said drily. “They have reached the shaft…”

Desperately, urgently, Morrow began to climb down once more.

Lieserl lay back in the glowing hydrogen-helium mix with arms outstretched and eyes closed, and felt fusion-product photons dance slowly around her. Following their minutes-long orbits around the core of the Sun, the long, lenticular forms of the photino birds flowed past Lieserl. She let the swarming birds cushion her as she sank into the choking heart of the Sun, floating as if in a dream.

And, at last, she came to a region, deep inside the Sun, in which no new photons were produced.

She and Scholes had been right, all those years ago. The core had gone out.

The persistent leeching-out of energy from the Sun’s hydrogen-fusing core, by the flocks of photino birds, had at last become untenable. A long time ago — probably before Lieserl’s birth — the temperature of the core had dropped so far that the fusion of hydrogen into helium flickered out, died.

Now, its heart already stilled, the Sun was working through its megayear death throes. Despite the slow, continuing migration of the last photons outward from the stilled fusion processes, there was little radiation pressure, here at the heart of the Sun, to balance the core’s tendency to collapse under gravity. So the extinguished core fell in on itself further, seeking a new equilibrium, its temperature rising as its mass compressed.

Lieserl knew that in the heart of every star of the Sun’s mass, these processes would at last take place — even without the intervention of an agent like the dark matter photino birds. Once the core hydrogen was exhausted, hydrogen fusion processes would die there, and this final subsidence, of a helium-soaked core, would begin.

The difference was, the Sun’s core was still replete with unburned hydrogen; fusion processes had died, not because of hydrogen exhaustion, but because of the theft of energy by untiring flocks of photino birds.

And, of course, the Sun should have enjoyed ten billion years of Main Sequence life before reaching this dire state. The photino birds had allowed Sol mere millions of years, before forcing this decrepitude.

Around him there was the noise of his own breathing, the soft, ringing sound of his hands and feet on the metal rungs, and — further away, and distorted by echo — the subtle noises of the forest folk as they climbed. There was an all pervading smell of metal, overlaid by a tang of staleness.

In the darkness Morrow had no way of judging time, and only the growing ache in his muscles to measure the distance he’d traveled. But slowly — to his surprise — his vision began to return, adapting to the gloom. There was actually quite a lot of light in here: there was the open portal at the top, on Deck One, and fine seams in the walls of the shaft shone like arrows of gray silver in the darkness. He could see the dim, foreshortened silhouettes of Arrow Maker and Spinner, above and below him; they climbed with a limber grace, like animals. And in the shaft itself he could see the shadow of cables, dangling, useless.

As he worked his muscles seemed to lose some of their stiffness. He was, he realized with surprise, enjoying this…

“Stop.” Spinner’s voice, softened by echo, came up to him.

He halted, clinging to the rungs, and hissed a warning up to Arrow Maker.

“What is it?”

“We’re in trouble,” Spinner said softly.

“No, we’re not,” Maker said. “We’re descending more quickly than those thugs with the cross-bows. They didn’t follow us down here. So they have to follow the ramps; we’re going straight down.”

Spinner sighed. “Damn it, Maker, I wish you’d listen to me. Look down. See?”

Arrow Maker straightened his arms and leaned out over the shaft; Uvarov, passive, dangled against his frame. “Oh.”

Morrow twisted his head to see.

There was a rough framework crossing the shaft, some distance below them. He felt a sudden surge of hope; was his climb nearly done? “Is that the base of the shaft?”

He saw the flash of Spinner’s teeth in the gloom as she grinned up at her father. “No,” she said. “No, not exactly.”

Maker said, “How far would you say we’ve descended, Spinner? Five hundred yards?… Barely a third of the way to the base of the lifedome, if Uvarov’s dimensions are correct.”

Five hundred yards… They were scarcely past Deck Four, Morrow realized: beyond the scuffed walls of the shaft here were the shops to which he strolled to work every shift. Or had, before he’d become a hunted criminal.

The transient enjoyment leached out of him; a trembling ache descended on his legs and upper arms. There was still twice as far to go as he’d traveled already…

“Do you understand their amusement, Morrow?” Uvarov asked acidly, his voice obscured by his limp posture. “The shaft has been blocked.”

“Maker,” Spinner whispered. “I can see someone moving down there.”

Morrow hooked his arm across a rung and looked down more carefully.

The platform blocking the shaft was quite a crude thing, of beams and plates lashed quickly together, roughly welded. A shadow crawled cautiously across the platform; there was a flare of laser-weld light, a small shower of sparks.

Spinner is right. Someone is moving down there — building the thing even as we watch. Deliberately blocking off the shaft, to stop us. How many times had he used laser tools like that? Thousands? It could easily have been him down there.

…In fact, he realized suddenly, he ought to know who that worker was.

He leaned further out and stared, squinting, trying to make out more of the stocky figure. He saw a sleeveless tunic, brawny arms and torso, surprisingly wasted legs…

“Constancy-of-Purpose. Constancy-of-Purpose.”

At the sound of Morrow’s voice, floating out of the gloom above her, Constancy-of-Purpose started. She dropped her laser weld, which died immediately, and scrambled backwards across the platform she’d been building. Morrow saw how she held her wounded arm away from her body, stiffly.

Morrow clambered briskly down the ladder, shouldering Spinner aside. He reached the platform and jumped down onto it. “Constancy-of-Purpose,” he whispered. “It’s me, Morrow.”

Constancy-of-Purpose got to her feet, warily. She pushed goggles up from her eyes. Morrow saw sweat gleam from her wide shoulders; where the goggles had been, dirt ringed her eyes. “What in Lethe — ”

“It’s all right. You don’t have to be afraid.”

“Morrow. What’s going on?”

“You have to let us through.”

“Us?” Constancy-of-Purpose glanced up into the darkness nervously.

“I have the forest folk with me. You remember.”

“Of course I damn well remember.” Constancy-of-Purpose reflexively rubbed her stiff arm and backed toward the wall of the shaft. “That little criminal shot me.”

“Yes, but — well, she was scared. Listen to me — you must let us through. Past this barrier.”

Constancy-of-Purpose looked at him, bafflement and suspicion evident in her face. “Why? What are you doing?”

“Don’t you know?” Actually, Morrow reflected, Constancy-of-Purpose probably didn’t know… The Planners had most likely sent out instructions to block off all the old shafts, without explanation. All to trap him, and these forest folk. I was just lucky to find Constancy-of-Purpose…

“I’m not stupid, Morrow,” Constancy-of-Purpose said. “I don’t know what’s going on, quite. But the Planners are obviously trying to trap these tree people. And I’m not surprised. They’re killers. And if you’re helping them — ”

“Listen. The Planners are the killers. Or at least, they’re trying to turn the likes of us into killers.” Morrow described the crossbows and sharpened pitons, weapons created from horribly mundane objects.

As he talked, Morrow’s mind seemed to race, making leaps of induction. He remembered how Uvarov had taunted him for naiveté. Was it really possible that Superet had machined these weapons so quickly, in response to the arrival of the forest folk?

No, he decided. There hadn’t been time. Superet must have weapons stockpiled.

But Constancy-of-Purpose was shaking her head. “I don’t believe you,” she said.

“Believe it,” Morrow snapped. “Spinner — the tree girl — got shot in the arm. By a piton, for Lethe’s sake. Do you want me to show you the wound?”

Constancy-of-Purpose looked up uncertainly. “I… no.”

“Constancy-of-Purpose, if you let us past we’ll be home free. The Planners surely won’t pursue us below Deck Four; this is the last point they can stop us… But if you keep us here, you’ll kill us, just as surely as if you wielded the crossbow yourself…”

Morrow tried to keep control of his own ragged breathing, not to let Constancy-of-Purpose be aware of his mounting fear.

“…All right.” Suddenly Constancy-of-Purpose, symbolically, moved aside. “Hurry. I’ll say I didn’t see you.”

Morrow reached out his hand, then let it drop. “Thank you.”

Constancy-of-Purpose frowned. “Just go, man.” She bent and, with the strength of her uninjured arm, began to prize up a partially welded plate, making a narrow gateway through the blocking platform.

After a moment’s hesitation the forest folk scrambled down the ladder and dropped to the platform, lightly. Constancy-of-Purpose glared at Spinner-of Rope. Spinner returned her stare, thoughtfully stroking the blowpipe at her waist.

“Go on,” Morrow told Spinner. “Through that plate.”

The forest folk hurried across the platform, their bare feet padding, and Spinner began to work her way through the hole.

Now Constancy-of-Purpose stared at Uvarov, still slung over Maker’s shoulder.

“Is he dead?”

“Who? The old man? Not quite, but as near as — damn it, I suppose… If I come by this way again, I’ll explain.”

“But you won’t be coming back, will you?” Constancy-of-Purpose’s blunt face was serious.

“…No. I don’t suppose I will.”

Constancy-of-Purpose backed away, her hands upraised. “You’re crazy. Maybe I should have stopped you after all.”

Arrow Maker, with Uvarov, was already through the platform, and Morrow sat down on the edge of the hole. He looked up. “Wish me luck.”

But Constancy-of-Purpose had already gone, out of the shaft and back to the mundane world of the Decks: to Morrow’s old life.

Morrow eased himself through the platform.

Before long Morrow’s shoulders and legs stiffened up again and began to hurt, seriously, and he was forced to take longer and longer breaks. The base of the shaft — illuminated by a ring of open ports — was a remote island of light that climbed toward him with infinite, cruel slowness.

Now they were far below the deepest inhabited level. Beyond the shaft’s cold walls, he knew, there was only darkness, stale air, abandoned homes. The cold seemed to pervade the shaft; he felt small, fragile, isolated.

They found ledges on which it was possible to rest — to stretch out, and even doze a little. Arrow Maker laid Uvarov down flat on the hard metal surfaces, and he showed Morrow how to massage his own muscles to stop them seizing up. Spinner produced food — dried fruit and meat — from a pouch at her waist; Morrow tried to eat but his stomach was a knot.

He counted the Decks as they passed them. Ten… Eleven… Twelve… The Decks above Four — all the world he had known, really — were an increasingly distant bubble of light and warmth, far above him.

And yet, if this journey was strange and disturbing for him, how much more difficult must it be for the forest folk? At least Morrow was used to metal walls. Spinner and her father had grown up with trees — animals, birds — living things. They must wonder if they would ever see their home again.

At last, though, the time came when he could count the last twenty rungs; then the last dozen; and then -

He staggered a few paces away from the ladder and laid himself out against a metal floor, spread-eagled. Here at the base of the shaft, a series of open, illuminated hatchways pierced the walls. “By Lethe’s waters,” he said. “What a day. I never thought I’d be so happy simply not to be in danger of falling.”

Arrow Maker lifted Uvarov from his shoulder and gently rested him, like a doll, against the wall of the elevator shaft. Morrow saw how Uvarov’s hand continued its endless, pendular tremble, and his mouth opened and closed with soft, obscene sounds. “Are we there? Are we down?”

Maker flexed his unburdened shoulder, swinging his arm around. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, we’re there…” He approached one of the hatchways, but slowed nervously as he approached the light.

Morrow got to his feet. He tried to remember how alien all this must be to these people; perhaps it was time for him to take charge. Picking a hatchway at random he walked confidently out of the shaft, and into bright, sourceless light.

The brightness, after the gloom of the shaft, was dazzling and huge. For a moment he stood there, by the entrance to the shaft, his hands shading his watering eyes.

He was in a bright, clean chamber. It must have been a mile wide and a fifth of a mile deep. The underside of the lowest Deck was a ceiling far above him, a tangle of pipes and cables, dark with age. The chamber was quite empty, although there were some dark, anonymous devices — cargo handlers? — stored in slings from the walls and upper bulkhead. Morrow felt himself quail; the emptiness of this huge enclosed space seemed to bear down on him. And below him -

He looked down.

The floor was transparent. Below his feet, there were stars.

12

After an unknowable, dreamlike interval, Lieserl became aware of a vague sense of discomfort — not pain, exactly, but a non-localized ache that permeated her body.

She sighed. If the discomfort wasn’t specific to any part of her Virtual body, there had to be something wrong with the autonomic systems that maintained her awareness — the basic refrigeration systems embedded in the wormhole throat, or maybe the shielded processor banks within which her consciousness resided.

Reluctantly she called up diagnostics from her central systems. Damn…

There had been a change, she realized quickly. But the problem wasn’t actually with her own systems. The change was in the external environment. There was a much greater flux of photons, from the Solar material, into her wormhole Interface. Her refrigeration units could cope with this greater influx of energy, but they’d had to adjust their working to do it — and that autonomic adjustment was what she had registered as a vague discomfort.

The increased photon flux puzzled her. Why should it be so? She ran some brief, brisk studies of the Solar environment. The remnant photons still diffused out on their million-year random walks toward the photosphere. Could it be that the core-killing action of the birds, their continual leaching away of core energy, was having some effect on the photon flux?

She looked for, and found, a structure to the increased flux. The flux strength was strongest, by far, in the direction of the orbits of the photino birds. That correlation couldn’t be a coincidence, surely; somehow the birds were influencing the flux rates.

And — she learned — the increased flux was quite localized. It didn’t show up more than a few miles from her own position.

Understanding came slowly, almost painfully.

The photon flood followed her around.

She forced herself to accept the fact that the photino birds were doing this deliberately. They were diverting the random walks of photons to flood her with the damn things.

For a while, fear touched her heart. Were the birds trying to kill this unwanted alien in the midst of their flocks — perhaps by seeking to overload her refrigeration system?

If so, there wasn’t much she could do about it. She didn’t have any help to call on, and no real way to escape. For a long time she limped after the birds in their endless circling of the core, monitoring the photon flux and trying to control her fear, her sense of imprisonment and panic.

But the flux remained steady — increased, but easily tolerated by her onboard systems. And the birds showed no sign of hostile intent to her; they continued to swirl around her in gaudy streams, or else they gathered behind her in their huge, neat, cone-shaped formations. They made no attempt to shield their young from her, or to protect their fragile-looking interior structures.

And, slowly, she began to understand.

This deliberate diversion of the photon flux into her wasn’t a threat, or an attempt to destroy her. Perhaps they thought she was injured, or even dying. They must be able to perceive radiant energy disappearing into her wormhole gullet. The birds were helping her — trying to supply her with more of what must seem to them to be her prerequisites for life.

The gift was useless, of course — in fact, given the increased strain on her refrigeration systems, worse than useless. But, she thought wryly, it’s the thought that counts.

The birds were trying to feed her.

Feeling strangely warmed, she accepted the gift of the photino birds with good grace.

As time wore on, she watched the Sun’s death proceed, with increasing pace. She felt an obscure, dark thrill as the huge physical processes unraveled around her.

The core, still plagued by the photino bird flocks, contracted and continued to heat up. At last, a temperature of tens of millions of degrees was reached in the layers of hydrogen surrounding the cankered core. A shell of fusing hydrogen ignited, outside the core, and began to burn its way out of the heart of the Sun. At first Lieserl wondered if the photino birds would try to quench this new shell of energy, as they had the hydrogen core. But they swept through the fusing shell, ignoring its brilliance. Helium ash was deposited by the shell onto the dead core; the core continued to grow in mass, collapsing still further under its own weight.

The heat energy emitted by the shell, with that of the inert, collapsing core, was greater than that which had been emitted by the original fusing core.

The Sun couldn’t sustain the increased heat output of its new heart. In an astonishingly short period it was forced to expand — to become giant.

Louise Ye Armonk stood on the forecastle deck of the Great Britain, peering down at the southern pole of Triton.

The Britain sailed through space half a mile above the satellite’s thin, gleaming cap of nitrogen ice; steam trailed through space, impossibly, from the ship’s single funnel. The ice cap curved beneath the prow of the ship as seamlessly as some huge eggshell. The southern hemisphere of Neptune’s largest moon was just entering its forty-year summer, and the ice cap was receding; when Louise tilted back her head she could see thin, high cirrus clouds of nitrogen ice streaming northwards on winds of evaporated pole material.

She walked across the deck, past the ship’s bell suspended in its elaborate cradle. The huge, misty bulk of Neptune was reflected in the bell’s gleaming surface, and Louise ran her hand over the cool contours of the shaped metal, making it rock gently; the multiple, amorphous images of Neptune slid gracefully across the metal.

From here the Sun was a bright star, a remote point of light; and the blue light of Neptune, eerily Earthlike, bathed the lines of the old ship, making her seem ethereal, not quite substantial — paradoxical, Louise reflected, since the Britain was actually the only real artifact in her sensorium at present.

As the Britain neared the ragged edge of Triton’s ice cap, a geyser blew, almost directly in front of the floating ship. Dark substrate material laced with nitrogen ice plumed into the air, rising ten miles from the plain; as it reached the thin, high altitude wind the plume turned through a right angle and streamed across the face of Triton. Louise walked to the lip of the forecastle deck and followed the line of the plume back down to the surface of the moon, where she could just see the fine crater in the ice at the plume’s base. The geyser was caused by the action of the sun’s heat on pockets of gas trapped beneath thin crusts of ice. Shards of ice were sprinkled around the site of the eruption, and some splinters still cartwheeled through the thin nitrogen atmosphere, slowly returning to the surface under the languid pull of Triton’s gravity.

This was one of her favorite Virtual dioramas, although it was actually one of the least familiar. The capability of her processors to generate these dioramas was huge, but not infinite; she’d deliberately kept the Neptune diorama in reserve, rationing its use over the unchanging centuries, to try to conserve its appeal.

It wasn’t hard to analyze why this particular Virtual scene appealed to her so much. The landscape of this remote moon was extraordinary and unfamiliar, and surprisingly full of change, fueled by the energies of distant Sol; and Neptune’s blue mass, with its traceries of nitrogen cirrus, was sufficiently Earthlike to prompt deep, almost buried feelings of nostalgia in her — and yet different enough that the references to Earth were almost subliminal, obscure enough that she was not tempted to descend into morbid longing. And -

Pixels swirled before her suddenly, a thousand self-orbiting blocks of light. Surprised, she almost stumbled; she gripped onto the rail at the edge of the deck for support.

The pixels coalesced with a soundless concussion into the image of Mark Wu. The projection was poor: the Virtual floated a few inches above the deck, and cast no shadow in Neptune’s pale light.

“Lethe’s waters,” Louise said, “don’t do that. You startled me.”

“I’m sorry,” Mark said. Even his voice was coarse and blocky, Louise noticed. “It was urgent. I had to interrupt you. I — ”

“And this projection’s lousy. What’s the matter with you?” Louise felt her mind slide comfortably into one of its familiar sets — what Mark called her analytical griping. She’d be able to while away a good chunk of the empty day interrogating the processor, picking over details of this representation of Mark. “You’re even floating above the deck, damn it. I wouldn’t be surprised if you start losing the illusion of solidity next. And — ”

“Louise. I said it was urgent.”

She found her voice trailing off, her concentration dissolving.

Mark stepped toward her, and his face enhanced visibly, fleshing out and gaining violet-blue tones of Neptunian light. The processors projecting Mark were obviously trying to help her through this interaction. But the rest of his body remained little more than a three-dimensional sketch — a sign that he was diverting most of the available processing power to another priority. “Louise,” Mark said, his voice soft but insistent. “Something’s happened. Something’s changed.”

“Changed?” Nothing’s changed — not significantly — for nearly a thousand years…

Mark smiled. “Your mouth is open.”

She swallowed. “I’m sorry. I think you’re going to have to give me a bit of time with this.”

“I’m going to turn off the diorama.”

She looked up with unreasonable panic at the remote face of Neptune. “Why?”

“Something’s happened, Louise — ”

“You said that already.”

“The lifedome.” His eyes were fixed on hers.

She felt dreamy, light, almost unconcerned, and she wondered if the nanobots working within her body were feeding her some subtle tranquilizer. “Tell me.”

“Someone is trying to use one of the ports in the lifedome base.” Mark’s eyes were deep, probing. “Do you understand, Louise? Can you hear what I’m saying?”

“Of course I can,” she snapped.

After five centuries without contact, someone was leaving the lifedome. She tried to grasp the reality of Mark’s statement, to envisage it. Someone was coming.

“Turn off the projection,” she told Mark wearily. “I’m ready.”

Neptune collapsed suddenly, like a burst balloon; Triton shriveled into a billion dwindling pixels, and the light of Sol flickered out. For a moment there was only the Great Britain, the undeniable reality of Brunel’s old ship hard and incongruent at the center of this infinity of grayness, of the absence of form; Mark stood before her on the battered deck, his too-real face fixed on hers, reassuring.

Then the Universe returned.

Arrow Maker was falling out of the world.

He sat in the craft — this pod, as Uvarov had called it — with his bow and quiver piled neatly on the seat next to him. His bare legs dangled over his chair’s smooth lip. There was a simple control console, just within his reach before him.

The pod’s walls were transparent, making the cylindrical hull almost invisible. The pod was nothing, less sheltering than an insubstantial dream; the four seats, with Maker and his incongruous, futile bow, seemed to be dropping unsupported through the air.

Uvarov had pointed out the pod to him. Maker had barely been able to see it — a box of translucent strangeness in a world of strangeness.

Uvarov had told him to get into the pod. Maker, without thought, it seemed, had obeyed.

Through the floor of the pod he could see the port approaching. It was a rectangle set in the base of the lifedome, bleak and unadorned, bordered by a line of pale brilliance. He could still see stars through the lifedome base, but he realized now that it wasn’t perfectly transparent. It returned some reflection of the sourceless inner light of the lifedome, making it a genuine floor across the world. Perhaps a layer of dust had collected over the base during the long centuries, spoiling its pristine clarity.

By contrast there was nothing within the expanding frame of the port — nothing, not even Uvarov’s stars. The frame was rising toward him, preparing to swallow him and this foolish craft like an opening mouth.

The port was a doorway to emptiness.

He felt his bowels loosen. Fear was constantly with him, constantly threatening to erupt from his control…

Spinner’s voice sounded small, distorted, emanating from the air. “Maker? Can you hear me? Are you all right?”

He cried out and gripped the edges of his seat. His throat was so tight with tension he couldn’t speak. He closed his eyes, shutting out the huge, bizarre unrealities around him, and tried to get some control. He lifted his hands to his waist; he touched the liana rope Spinner had wrapped around him as a good luck talisman, just before his departure.

“Maker? Arrow Maker?”

“…Spinner,” he gasped. “I can hear you. Are you all right?”

She laughed, and just for a moment he could visualize her round, sardonic face, the way she would push her spectacles up her short nose. “That’s hardly the point, is it? The question is, are you all right?”

“Yes.” He opened his eyes, cautiously. The invisible engines of this bubble-pod hummed, almost silently, and below him the exit from the lifedome was a floor of gray emptiness, expanding toward him with exquisite slowness. “Yes, I’m all right. You startled me a bit, that’s all.”

“I’m not surprised.” The voice of the tall, dry man from the Decks — Morrow was rendered even more flat than usual by the distortions of the hidden communications devices. “Maybe we should have spent more time showing you what to expect.”

“Is there anything you want?”

“Yes, Spinner-of-Rope.” Arrow Maker felt small, fragile, isolated, like a child in a vehicle made for adults. All around him there was a sharp, empty smell: of plastic and metal, an absence of life. He longed for the rich humidity of the jungle. “I wish we could go home,” he told his daughter.

“For Life’s sake, stop this babbling.” The voice of Garry Uvarov was like a rattle of bone against glass. “Arrow Maker,” Uvarov said. “Where are you?”

Maker hesitated. The lifedome exit was huge beneath him now — he was so close to it, in fact, that its corners and edges were foreshortened; the semi-transparent surface of the lifedome turned into a rim of distant, star-spangled carpet around this immense cavity. He felt himself cringe. He reached out blindly for his bow and clutched it to his chest; it was a small token of normality in this world of strangeness. “I can’t be more than a dozen feet from the exit. And I — ”

The lip of the port, brightly lit, slid upwards around the pod, now; Arrow Maker felt as if he were being immersed in some bottomless pool.

When she understood the birds were trying to feed her, she tried to pick out individuals among the huge flocks. She told herself she wanted to study the birds: learn more of their lifecycle, mediated as it was by baryonic matter, and perhaps even try to become empathetic with the birds, to try to comprehend their individual and racial goals.

But making friends with photino birds — forming contact with individuals in anything like a conventional human sense — simply wasn’t a possibility for her, it emerged. They were so nearly alike — after all, she reflected, given their simple reproductive strategy the birds were very nearly clones of each other that it was all but impossible for her to tell them apart. And, on their brief orbits around the Sun, they flashed past her so quickly. She certainly couldn’t identify them closely enough to follow individuals through consecutive orbits past her.

So — though she was surrounded by the birds, and bathed in their strange, luminous generosity — Lieserl remained, still, fundamentally alone.

She felt intense disappointment at this. At first she told herself that this was a symptom of her limited understanding of the birds: Lieserl, as the frustrated scientist.

But this was just a rationalization, she knew.

She forced herself to be honest. What some part of her really wanted, deep down, was for the photino birds to accept her — if not as one of their own, then as a tolerable alien in their midst.

When she first diagnosed this about herself, she felt humiliated. For the first time she was glad there was nobody observing her, no latter-day equivalent of Kevan Scholes studying her telemetry and deducing her mental state. Was she really so pathetic, so internally weak, that she needed to cling to crumbs of friendship — even from these dark-matter creatures, whose alienness from her was so fundamental that it made the differences between humans and Qax look like close kinship?

Was she really so lonely?

The subsequent embarrassment and fit of self-loathing took a long time to fade.

Individual contact with the birds would be meaningless anyway. Since they were so alike, their behavior as individuals so undifferentiated, racial goals seemed far more important to the birds than individual goals. Personality was subsumed beneath the purpose of the species to a far greater extent than it ever had been with humans — even at the time of the Assimilation, she thought, when opposition to the Xeelee had emerged as a clear racial goal for humanity.

She watched the birds breed, endlessly, the swarms of clumsy young sweeping on uncontrolled elliptical orbits around the Sun’s core in pursuit of their parents.

The birds’ cloning mode of reproduction seemed to shape the course of their lives.

At first the cloning seemed restrictive — even claustrophobic. Racial goals, downloaded directly from the mother’s awareness into the young, overrode any individual ambitions. The young were robots, she decided, programmed from birth to fulfill the objectives of the species.

But then, so had she been programmed by her species — and so, to some extent, had every human who had ever lived, she thought. It was all a question of degree.

And anyway, would it really be so terrible, to be a photino bird?

With species-objective programming must come an immense fund of wisdom. The youngest photino bird would come to awareness with an expanded set of racial memories and drivers surely beyond the comprehension of any human.

Phillida had boasted that she — Lieserl — would become, with her close and accurate control of her memories and the functions of her mind, the most conscious human who had ever lived. Maybe that was once true. But, even at the height of her powers, Lieserl’s degree of awareness was surely a mere candle compared to the immense conscious power available to the humblest of the photino birds.

And perhaps, she thought wistfully, these birds were all components of some extended group-mind — perhaps to analyze the consciousness of any individual bird would be as meaningless as to study the awareness of a single component in her own processing banks, or one neuron in the brain of a conventional human.

Perhaps.

But that didn’t seem important to Lieserl, compared to the sense of belonging the birds must share.

Lieserl, the eternal outsider, watched the birds sweep past her in their lively, coordinated flights. She felt awe — and something else: envy.

She pulled away from the shrinking core of the Sun, out through the searing hydrogen-fusing shell, and soared up into the envelope — the bloated, gaseous mantle that the outer forty percent of giant-Sun’s mass had become. The envelope was a universe of thin gas — so thin, she imagined, that if she tried hard enough she could see out through these teeming layers, to the stars beyond (or what was left of them).

The Sun was a red giant. It had become a pocket cosmos in itself, with its own star — the hydrogen-fusion shell around the dead core — blazing at the center of this clogged, gas-filled space. But the outer layers, the mantle, had become so swollen that they utterly dwarfed the core. In fact, the dimensions of the Sun were like those of an atom, she realized, with the shrunken, blazing core occupying the same proportion of space within its mantle-cloud as did the nucleus of an atom within its cloud of electrons.

The photino birds clustered around the Sun’s shrinking heart, sipping relentlessly at its energy store. She was outside the bulk of the flock now although some outriders still swept past her, on their way into the flock from the Universe outside. With a new feeling of detachment, she started to experience a deepening sense of disquiet at the activities of the birds. From this perspective, the birds seemed like carrion, she thought, or tiny, malevolent parasites.

Restless, disturbed, Lieserl moved through the huge envelope. There was structure here, even in this immense volume, she saw. The photosphere of the new red giant — its huge, glowing surface — had actually become less opaque to radiation; its temperature had fallen so far that electrons had recombined with nuclei, increasing the transparency of the surface layers. So — even though its surface temperature had dropped — the Sun was actually radiating more energy, overall, than it had done before its swelling.

To fuel this increased luminosity, immense convection cycles had started — cells which spanned millions of miles, and which would persist for hundreds of days. The convection cycles dug deep into the mantle to haul energy out of the core regions to be pumped out to space — and along with the energy dredging, Lieserl saw, the convection was changing the composition of the Sun, polluting the outer regions with nucleosynthesis products like nitrogen-14, dug out of the core regions.

Coherent maser radiation flashed along the flanks of the convection cells, startling her with its intensity.

As she traveled through the thin gas she felt a faint buffeting, a rocking of the exotic-matter framework of her Interface.

There was turbulence here. The convection process wasn’t perfectly efficient, and energy, struggling to escape from the inner regions, was forced to dissipate itself in a complex, space-filling array of turbulent cells. The Sun’s magnetic field was affected by this turbulence. She saw how the flux was pushed out of the interior of the cells, to form fine sheets across the cells’ surfaces — but the sheets were unstable, and they burst like sheets of soap film, leaving ropes of flux at the intersections of the turbulence cells. Lieserl swam through a million-mile mesh of the magnetic flux ropes.

It was bizarre to think that — if she wished — she could travel out as far as the old orbital radius of Earth, without ever leaving the substance of the Sun.

Lieserl knew — with remote, abstract sadness — that the inner planets, out as far as Earth, must have been consumed in the Sun’s cooling, red-tinged mantle. She remembered her brief, golden childhood: the sparkling beaches of the Aegean, the sharp, enticing scent of the sea, the feel of sand between her babyish toes. Perhaps humans, somewhere, were still enjoying such experiences.

But Earth, the only world she had known, was gone forever.

13

“Arrow Maker, tell me what you see. Can you see the stars?”

Arrow Maker looked down, through the pod hull. “I don’t understand.”

Uvarov’s voice, disembodied, became ragged; Arrow Maker imagined the old man thrashing feebly beneath his blanket. “Can you see Sol? You should be able to, by now. Arrow Maker — is Earth there? Is — ”

“No.”

“Maker — ”

“No.”

Arrow Maker shouted the last word, and Uvarov subsided.

The illuminated lip of the port had passed right over the pod now; it was visible to Maker as a frame of light above his head. The outer darkness had enclosed the pod… No, he was thinking about this in the wrong way. The darkness was the Universe; as if in some obscene, mechanical birth, the pod had been expelled from the lifedome into the dark.

The base of the lifedome hung over him like a huge belly of glass and metal, receding slowly, its curvature becoming apparent. And through it — distorted, rendered misty by the base material — he made out the light-filled interior of the dome. He could see bits of detail: elevator shafts from the decks above, control consoles like the one at which he’d left Spinner, Morrow and Uvarov — why, if he had eyes sharp enough, he could probably look up now and see the soles of his daughter’s feet.

Suddenly the reality of it hit him. He had traveled outside the lifedome. He was beyond its protective hull — perhaps the first human to have ventured outside in half a millennium — and now he was suspended in the emptiness which made up most of the forbidding, lifeless Universe.

“Arrow Maker. Talk to us.”

Arrow Maker laughed, his voice shrill in his own ears. “I’m suspended in a glass bubble, surrounded by emptiness. I can see the lifedome. It’s like — ”

“Like what?” Morrow’s voice, sounding intrigued.

“Like a box of light. Quite — beautiful. But very fragile-looking…”

Uvarov cut in, “Oh, give me strength. What else, Arrow Maker?”

Arrow Maker twisted his head, to left and right.

To the right of the pod, an immense pillar of sculpted metal swept through space. It was huge, quite dwarfing the pod, like the trunk of some bizarre artificial tree. It merged seamlessly with the lifedome, and it was encrusted with cups, ribs and flowers of shaped metal.

Maker described this.

“The spine,” Uvarov said impatiently. “You’re traveling parallel to the spine of the GUTship. Yes, yes; just as I told you. Arrow Maker, can you see the Interface? The wormhole — ”

Arrow Maker leaned forward and peered down, past the seats and stanchions, through the pod’s base. This spine descended for a great distance, its encrustation of parasitic forms dwindling with perspective, until the spine narrowed to a mere irregular line. The whole form was no less than three miles long, Uvarov had told him.

Beyond the spine’s end was a sheet of light which hid half the sky. The light was eggshell-blue and softly textured; it was like a vast, inverted flower petal, ribbed with lines of stronger, paler hue. As Arrow Maker watched he could see a slow evolution in the patterns of light, with the paler lines waving softly, coalescing and splitting, like hair in a breeze. The light cast blue highlights, rich and varying, from the structures along the spine.

He was looking at the GUTdrive: the light came from the primeval energies, Uvarov had told him, which had hurled the ship and all its cargo through space and time for a thousand years.

Silhouetted against the sheet of creation light, just below the base of the spine, was a dark, irregular mass, too distant for Arrow Maker to resolve: that was the tethered ice asteroid, which still — after all these years — patiently gave up its flesh to serve as reaction mass for the great craft. And -

“Uvarov. The Interface. I see it.”

There, halfway down the spine’s gleaming length, was a tetrahedral structure: edged in glowing blue, tethered to the spine by what looked like hoops of gold.

“Good.” He heard a tremulous relief in Uvarov’s voice. “Good. Now, Arrow Maker — look around the sky, and describe the stars you see.”

Arrow Maker stared, beyond the ship. The spine, the Interface, were suspended in darkness.

Uvarov’s speech became rushed, almost slurred. “Why, we might be able to place our position — and the date — by the constellations. If I can find the old catalogs; those damn survivalists in the Decks must have retained them. And — ”

“Uvarov.” Arrow Maker tried to inject strength into his voice. “Listen to me. There’s something wrong.”

“There can’t be. I — ”

“There are no constellations. There are no stars.” Beyond the ship there was only emptiness; it was as if the great ship, with its flaring drive and teeming lifedome, was the only object in the Universe…

No, that wasn’t quite true. He stared to left and right, scanning the equator of the gray-black sky around him; there seemed to be something there — a ribbon of light, too faint to make out color.

He described this to Uvarov.

“The starbow.” Uvarov’s voice sounded much weaker, now. “But that’s impossible. If there’s a starbow we must be traveling, still, at relativistic velocities. But we can’t be.” The old, dead voice cracked. “Maker, you’ve seen the stars yourself.”

“No.” Arrow Maker tried to make his voice gentle. “Uvarov, all I’ve ever seen were points of light in a sky-dome… Maybe they weren’t stars at all.”

If, he thought ruefully, the stars ever existed at all.

He stared at the mass of the spine as it slid upwards past him, suddenly relishing its immensity, its detail. He was glad there were no stars. If this ship was all that existed, anywhere in the Universe, then it would be enough for him. He could spend a lifetime exploring the worlds contained within its lifedome, and there would always be the forest to return to. And -

Light filled the cabin: a storm of it, multicolored cubes and spheres which swarmed around him, dazzling him. Then, as suddenly as they had appeared, the cubes hurtled together and coalesced.

There was a man sitting beside Arrow Maker, inside the pod, dressed in a gray silver tunic and trousers. His hands were in his lap, folded calmly, and through his belly and thighs Arrow Maker could see the quiver of arrows he’d left on the chair — he could actually see the quiver, through the flesh of the man.

The man smiled. “My name’s Mark — Mark Bassett Friar Armonk Wu. Don’t be frightened.”

Arrow Maker screamed.

Lieserl swam with the photino birds through the heart of the bloated Sun. The photino birds appeared to relish Sol’s new incarnation. Plasma oscillations caused energy to flood out of the core, in neutrino-antineutrino pairs, and the birds swooped around the core, drinking in this glow of new radiance.

The matter in the inert, collapsing core had become so compressed it was degenerate, its density so high that the intermolecular forces that governed its behavior as a gas had broken down. Now, the gravitational infall was balanced by the pressure of electrons themselves: the mysterious rule of quantum mechanics called the Pauli Exclusion Principle, which ensures that no two electrons can share the same energy level.

But this new state of equilibrium couldn’t last for long, Lieserl realized. The shell of fusing hydrogen around the core continued to burn its way outward, raining helium ash down on the core; and so the core continued to grow, to heat up.

Now that the inner planets were gone, she felt utterly isolated.

Why, even the stone-faced bureaucrats of the Assimilation period had been contact of a sort. She’d found it immensely valuable to be able to share impressions with somebody else — somebody outside her own sensorium. In fact she wondered if it were possible for any human being to remain sane, given a long enough period without communication.

But then again, she thought wryly, she wasn’t a human being…

Into Lethe with that. She closed her eyes and stretched. She took a slow, careful inventory of her Virtual body-image. She wriggled her fingers, relishing the detailed feel of sliding tendons and stretching skin; she arched her back and felt the muscles at the front of her thighs pull taut; she worked her feet forward and back, as if she were training for some celestial ballet, and focused on the slow, smooth working of her ankles and toes.

She was human, all right, and she was determined to stay that way — even despite the way she’d been treated by humans themselves, in her brief, but still vivid, corporeal life. What had she been but a freak, an experiment that had ultimately been abandoned?

She didn’t owe people anything, she told herself.

Maybe.

But again that buried urge to communicate all this gripped her: she felt she had to tell someone about all this, to warn them.

But those feelings weren’t logical, she knew. Since the wormhole telemetry link had been shut down she had no way to communicate anyway. And while she had dreamed, here inside the imperilled heart of the Sun, five million years had worn away in the Solar System outside. For all she knew there might be no humans left alive, anywhere, to hear whatever she might have to say.

…Still, she itched to talk.

Again, maser radiation shone out of a convection cell and sparkled over her, bright and coherent.

Intrigued, she followed the path of one of the convection cells as it swept out of the heart of the Sun, bearing its freight of heat energy; she tried to trace the source of the maser light.

The radiation, she found, was coming from a thin trace of silicon monoxide in the mantle gas. Collisions between particles were pumping the gas with energy, she saw — leaving the monoxide molecules in an unstable, excited state, rotating rapidly.

A photon of just the right frequency, impacting a pumped molecule, could cause the molecule to tip out of its unstable state. The molecule shed energy and emitted another photon of the same frequency. So the result was two photons, where one had been before… And the two photons stimulated two more atoms, resulting in four photons… A chain reaction followed, growing geometrically, with a flood of photons from the stimulated silicon monoxide molecules — all at the same microwave frequency, and all coherent — with the same phase.

Lieserl knew that to get significant maser effects, pumped molecules had to be arranged in a line of sight, to get a long path of coherence. The convection cells, with their huge, multimillion-mile journeys to the surface and back, provided just such pathways. Maser radiation cascaded up and down the long flanks of the cells, spearing into and out of the helium core.

The maser radiation could even escape from the Sun altogether, she saw. The convection founts grazed the surface, at their most extreme points; maser energy was blasted out, tangential to the surface of the swollen Sun, forming tiny, precise beacons of coherent light.

And the maser beacons were, she realized with a growing excitement, very, very distinctive.

Excited, she swept back and forth through the huge convection cells. It wasn’t difficult, she found, to disrupt the form of the coherent silicon monoxide maser beams; she imposed structure on the beams’ polarization, phasing and coherent lengths.

She started with simple signals: sequences of prime numbers, straightforward binary arrays of symbols. She could keep that up almost indefinitely; thanks to the time it took for the coherent radiation to reach their firing points at the surface, it was sufficient for her to return to the convection cells every few days to re-initiate her sequence of signals. She could trace echoes of her signals, in fact, persisting even in the downfalling sides of the cells.

Then, as her confidence grew, she began to impose meaningful information content on her simple signal structure. With binary representations of images in two and three dimensions, and with data provided in every human language she knew, she began to relate the story of what had happened to her, here in the heart of the Sun — and of what the photino birds were doing to mankind’s star.

Feverishly she worked at the maser signals, while the final death of the Sun unraveled.

In the stern galley of the Great Britain, Louise sat before her data desks. The little pod from the lifedome showed up as a block of pixels sliding past a schematic of the Northern.

Over the radio link she heard screams.

“Oh, for Lethe’s sake, Mark, don’t scare him completely out of his mind.”

Mark sounded hurt. “I’m doing my best.”

Louise felt too tired, too used up, to cope with this sudden flood of events.

She tried, sometimes, to remember how it had been to be young. Or even, not quite so old. It might have been different if Mark had survived, of course: his AS system had imploded after four centuries, not long after he and Louise had moved out of the lifedome and into the Britain. Maybe if Mark had lived, if she’d spent all these years with another person — not alone — she wouldn’t have ended up feeling so damn stale.

She comforted herself with the thought that, whatever was going on today, the Northern’s immense journey was nearing its end, now. Another few decades, when she had shepherded the wormhole Interface and motley inhabitants of the lifedome — those who’d survived among those battling, swarming masses — through all these dreadful years, she would be able to let go at last. Maybe she would implode then, she thought, like some dried-up husk.

She called up a projection of its trajectory. “Well, it’s not heading for the Britain,” she told Virtual-Mark. “It’s moving past us…”

A new voice came crackling out of her data desk now. “Arrow Maker. Arrow Maker. Listen to me. You must reach the Interface. Don’t let them stop you…”

To Louise, this was a voice from the dead past. It was distorted by age, almost reduced to a caricature, echoing as if centuries were empty rooms.

She localized the source of the transmission — a desk in the base of the lifedome, near the pod hangars — and she threw open a two-way link. “Uvarov? Garry Uvarov?”

The voice fell silent, abruptly.

She heard Mark, in the pod, saying, “Now just take it easy. I know this is strange for you, but I’m not going to hurt you.” A pause. “I couldn’t if I tried. I’ll tell you a secret: I’m not real. See? My hand is passing right through your arm, and — ”

More screams, even shriller than before.

Oh, Mark…

“Come on, Uvarov,” she said. “I know it’s you. I still recognize that damn Moon accent. Speak to me.”

“Oh, Lethe, Louise,” Mark reported, “he’s gone crazy. He’s grabbed the stick: he’s accelerating — right toward the Interface.”

Mark was right, she saw; the craft’s speed had increased, and it was clearly heading to where the wormhole Interface was cradled in its web of superconducting hoops, bound magnetically to the structure of the GUTship.

She punched in quick queries. Less than two minutes remained before the pod reached the Interface.

“Uvarov, listen to me,” she said urgently. “You must respond. Please.” While she spoke her hands flew over the desks; she ordered her processors to find some way to take control of the pod. She cursed herself, silently, for her carelessness. She’d had centuries, literally, to find ways of immobilizing the lifedome pods. But she’d never imagined this scenario, some crazy savage with a painted face taking a pod into the Interface while they were still relativistic.

Well, she damn well should have imagined it.

“Uvarov. You must respond. We’re still in flight.” She tried to imagine the old eugenicist’s condition, extrapolating wildly from the few words she’d heard him speak. “Uvarov, can you hear me? You have to stop him — the man in the pod, this Arrow Maker. He’ll destroy himself…” And, she thought sourly, maybe the whole damn ship as well. “You know as well as I do that the Interface can’t be used during the flight. The kinetic energy difference between our Interface and the one back in the past will make the wormhole unstable. If your Arrow Maker flies that pod in there, he’ll wreck the wormhole.”

“You’re lying,” Uvarov rasped. “The journey’s over. We’ve seen the stars.”

“Uvarov, listen to me. We’re still relativistic.” She turned to peer out of the galley’s small windows. The Britain was suspended beneath the belly of the lifedome, so that the dome was huge and brilliant above her; the spine pierced space a few hundred yards away. And, all around the spine, the starbow — the ring of starlight aberrated by their motion — gleamed dully, infinitely far away.

With a small corner of her mind, she longed to shut this out, to erect some Virtual illusion to hide in.

“I can see the damn starbow, Uvarov. With my own eyes, right now. We’re decelerating, but we’re still relativistic. We have decades of this journey ahead of us yet…” Was it possible Uvarov had forgotten?

In the background she could hear Mark’s voice patiently pleading with the primitive in the pod; her desks showed her endless representations of the processors’ failed attempts to override the pod’s autonomous systems, and the astonishingly rapid convergence of the pod with the Interface.

He pushed the crude control as far forward as it would go. The pod hurtled past the spine. He felt mesmerized, bound up in the extraordinary events around him, beyond any remnants of fear.

Once again a frame of light embraced the pod, expanding, enclosing, like a swallowing mouth. This time, the frame was triangular, not rectangular; it was rimmed by blue light, not silver-white. And it contained — not a bleak, charcoal-gray emptiness — but a pool of golden light, elusive, shimmering.

There were stars in that pool. How ironic it was, thought Arrow Maker, that perhaps here at last he would find the stars of which old, mad Uvarov had dreamed.

The ghost-man — Mark — was still speaking to him, urgently; but the ghost was crumbling into cubes of light, which scattered in the air, shrinking and melting.

Arrow Maker barely noticed.

Suddenly, she thought she understood.

She spoke rapidly. “Uvarov, listen. Please. The skydome above the forest isn’t truly transparent. It’s semisentient — it’s designed to deconvolve the distorting effects of the flight, to project an illusion of stars, of normal sky. Garry, can you hear me? The skydome shows a reconstruction of the sky and I think you’ve forgotten that it’s a reconstruction. The forest people can’t have seen the stars.” She tried to find words to reach this man, whom she’d first known a thousand years ago. “I’m sorry, Garry. I truly am. But you must make him turn back.”

“Louise.” Mark’s voice was clipped, urgent. “Arrow Maker is not responding. I’m starting to break up; we’re already within the exoticity field of the Interface, and — ”

Uvarov screamed, “The Interface, Arrow Maker! You’ll travel back across five million years — tell them we’re here, that we made it, Arrow Maker!”

Now there were other voices on Uvarov’s link: a man, a girl. “Maker! Maker! Come back…”

Mark’s voice faded out.

On Louise’s desk, the gleaming, toylike images, of pod and Interface, converged.

The blue-white framework was all around him now, its glow flooding the cabin of the pod with shadowless light and banishing the spine and lifedome, as if they were insubstantial. The pod shuddered, its framework glowing blue-violet.

The voice of Spinner-of-Rope, his daughter, became indistinct.

He called to her: “Look after your sister, Spinner-of-Rope.”

He couldn’t make out her reply. Soon there was only the tone of her dear voice, pleading, pressing.

A tunnel — lined by sheets of light, shimmering, impossibly long — opened out before him.

He sank into the golden pool, and even Spinner’s voice was lost.

Louise massaged her temples and closed her eyes. There was nothing more she could do. Not now.

She remembered how it had become clear — early in the flight, after a shockingly short time — that the Northern’s fragile artificial society was going to collapse. Mark had helped her understand the cramped social dynamics going on inside the lifedome: the dome contained a closed system, he said, with positive socio-feedback mechanisms leading to wild instabilities, and…

But understanding hadn’t helped them cope with the collapse.

The first rebellion had been inspired by one of Louise’s closest allies: Uvarov, who had led his eugenics-inspired withdrawal to the forest. After that Superet or rather, the Planners who had turned the original Superet philosophy into a bizarre ideology — had subverted whatever authority Louise had retained and imposed its will on the remaining inhabitants of the lifedome.

Louise and Mark had withdrawn to this place: to the converted, secure Great Britain. From here Louise had isolated the starship’s essential systems — life support and control — from the inhabitants of the dome. During the long centuries since — long after Mark’s death, long after the occupants of the dome had forgotten her existence — she had watched over the swarming masses within the lifedome: regulating their air, ensuring the balance of the small, enclosed ecologies was maintained, guiding the ship to its final destination.

What the people did to each other, what they believed, was beyond her control. Perhaps it always had been. All she strove to do was to keep as many as possible of them alive.

But now, if the wormhole was lost, it had all been for nothing. Nothing.

The kinetic energy of the pod shattered the spacetime flaw that was the wormhole. The portal behind it imploded at lightspeed, and gravitational waves and exotic particles pulsed around the craft.

Arrow Maker felt the air thicken in his lungs, cold settling over his bare skin. The pod jolted, and he was almost thrown out of his seat; calmly he unwrapped Spinner’s liana-rope from his waist and tied it around his torso and the seat, binding himself securely.

He held his hands before his face. He saw frost, glistening on his skin; his breath steamed in the air before him.

The pod’s fragile hull cracked and starred; one by one the craft’s systems — its heating, lights, air — collapsed under the hammer-blows of this impossible motion.

Through a transient network of wormholes which collapsed behind him in storms of heavy particles and gravity waves. Arrow Maker fell across past and future, the light of collapsing spacetime playing over his shivering flesh.

Light flared from the Interface. It gushed from every face of the tetrahedron like some liquid, bathing the Northern in violet fire.

It was like a small sun.

The starship shuddered. The steady glow of the GUT-drive flickered — actually flickered, for the first time in centuries. The Britain, old and fragile in its cradle, rocked back and forth, and Louise heard a distant clatter of falling objects, the incongruously domestic sound of sliding furniture.

All over the lifedome, lights flickered and died.

14

He was the last man.

He was beyond time and space. The great quantum functions which encompassed the Universe slid past him like a vast, turbulent river, and his eyes were filled with the gray light against which all phenomena are shadows.

Time wore away, unmarked.

And then —

There was a box, drifting in space, tetrahedral, clear-walled.

From around an impossible corner a human entered the box. He sat in a battered, fragile craft which tumbled through space. A rope was wrapped around his waist, and he was dressed in treated animal skins. He was gaunt, encrusted in filth, his skin ravaged by frost.

He stared out at the stars, astonished.

Spacetime-fire erupted into the box, finally engulfing the little craft.

Something had changed. History had resumed.

Michael Poole’s extended awareness stirred.