Vacuum Diagrams

Fragments. Shards…

Humans even reached into the Prime Radiant of the Xeelee.

Here was a warship, its engine blazing, falling through Bolder’s Ring — and into a new Universe.

The ship imploded, and fell into a compact, glowing nebula. Crew members hurried through the corridors of their falling ship; smoke filled the passageways as lurid flames singed the air. The hull was breached; the raw air of the nebula scoured through the cabins, and through rents in the silver walls the crew saw flying trees and huge, cloudy whales, all utterly unlike anything in their experience…

Gradually they came to understand. Gravity was the key to the absurd place they were stranded in. Gravity here was a billion times as strong as in the Universe they’d come from. Here their home planet would have a surface gravity of a billion gees — if it didn’t implode in an instant.

The crew adapted, and survived. Gradually humans spread through the nebula…

Stowaway

It was the end of Rees’s work shift. Wearily he hauled himself through the foundry door. Cool air dried the sweat from his brow.

He pulled himself along the ropes and roofs towards his cabin, inspecting his hands and arms with some interest. When one of the older workers had dropped a ladle of iron, Rees had narrowly dodged a hail of molten metal; tiny droplets had drifted into his flesh, sizzling out little craters which—

A huge shadow flapped across the Belt. Air washed over his back. He looked up; and wonder settled at the base of his skull.

The tree was a wheel of wood and foliage fifty yards wide, magnificent against the crimson sky. Its dozen radial branches and their veil of leaves turned with a calm possession; the trunk was like a mighty wooden skull which glared around at the ocean of crimson air.

Its rotation slowing, the tree lowered itself reluctantly into the gravity well of the star kernel.

Pallis, the tree-pilot, was hanging by hands and feet below the knotty trunk of the tree. The star kernel and its churning Belt mine were behind his back. The Belt itself was a circle eight hundred yards wide, a chain of battered dwellings and work places connected by ropes and tubes. At the center of the Belt was the mine itself, a cooled-down star kernel a hundred yards wide; lifting cables dangled from the Belt to the surface of the star kernel, scraping the rusty meniscus at a few feet per second. Here and there, fixed to the walls and roofs of the Belt, were the massive, white-metal mouths of jets; every few minutes a puff of steam emerged from one of those throats and the Belt tugged imperceptibly faster at his heels, shaking off the slowing effects of air friction…

It was a spectacular sight, but it was of little interest to Pallis.

With a critical eye he peered up through the mat of foliage at the smoke which hung raggedly over the upper branches. The layer of smoke wasn’t anywhere near thick enough: he could clearly see starlight splashing through to bathe the tree’s round leaves. He moved his hands along the nearest branch, felt the uncertain quivering of the fine blade of wood. Even here, at the root of the branches, he could feel the tree’s turbulent uncertainty.

Two imperatives acted on the tree. It strove to flee the deadly gravity well of the star — but it also sought to escape the shadow of the smoke cloud, which drove it back into the well. A skillful woodsman should have the two imperatives in fine balance; the tree should hover in an unstable equilibrium at the required distance.

Now the tree’s rotating branches bit into the air and it jerked upwards by a good yard. Pallis was almost shaken loose. A cloud of skitters came tumbling from the foliage; the tiny wheel-shaped creatures buzzed around his face and arms as they tried to regain the security of their parent.

Damn that boy —

He hauled himself through the foliage to the top side of the tree. The ragged blanket of smoke and steam hung a few yards above his head, attached tenuously to the branches by threads of smoke. The damp wood in at least half the fire bowls fixed to the branches had, he soon found, been consumed. And Gover, his so-called apprentice, was nowhere to be seen.

“Gover! By the Bones themselves, what do you think you are doing?”

A thin face appeared above one of the bowls near the rim of the tree. Gover shook his way out of a nest of leaves and came scurrying across the platform of foliage, a pack bouncing against his narrow back. He shoved the back of his hand against his nose, pushing the nostrils out of shape; the hand came away glistening. “I’d finished,” he mumbled.

Pallis stabbed a finger at Gover’s pack. “You’re still carrying half your stock of wood. The fires are dying. And look at the state of the smoke screen. More holes than your damn vest. My tree doesn’t know whether she’s coming or going, thanks to you. Can’t you feel her shuddering? Now move it.”

With a flurry of motion Gover pulled himself to the nearest pot and began hauling wood from his pack. Soon fresh billows of smoke were rising to join the depleted cloud, and the shuddering of the tree subsided.

His exasperation simmering, Pallis watched the boy’s awkward movements. Oh, he’d had his share of poor apprentices in the past, but in the old times most of them had at least been willing to learn. To try. And gradually, as hard shifts wore by, those young people had grown into responsible men and women, their minds toughening with their bodies.

But not this lot. Not the new generation.

This was his third flight with the boy Gover. And the lad was still as sullen and obstructive as when he’d first been assigned to the trees; when they got back to the Raft Pallis would be more than glad to hand him back to Science.

His gaze roamed around the red sky, restless.

The air of the Nebula was, as always, stained blood-red. A corner of his mind tried to measure that redness — was it deeper than last shift? — while his eyes flicked around the objects scattered through the Nebula above and below him. The clouds were like handfuls of grayish cloth sprinkled through miles of air. Stars fell among and through the clouds in a slow, endless rain that tumbled down to the Core. It was as if he were suspended in a great cloud of light; the star-spheres receded with distance into points of light, so that the sky itself was a curtain glowing red-yellow. The falling stars were an array of pinpoints dwindling into the far distance; the depths of the Nebula, far below him, were a sink of murky crimson.

The light of the mile-wide stars cast shifting shadows over the clouds, the scattered trees, the huge blurs that might be whales. Here and there he saw a tiny flash that marked the end of a star’s brief existence…

In his time, the world had changed around Pallis. The Nebula seemed to be choking up. The crisp blue skies, the rich breezes of his youth were memories now; the very air was turning into a smoky crimson sludge.

The world was dying, and no one knew why, or how to stop it.

And one thing was for sure. Pallis’s trees didn’t like this gloom.

He sighed, trying to snap out of his introspection. The stars kept falling no matter what the color of the sky. Life went on, and he had work to do.

A heavy cloud, fat with rain, drifted over the Belt, reducing visibility to a few yards; the air it brought with it seemed exceptionally sour and thin.

Rees prowled around the cables that girdled his world, muscles working restlessly. He completed two full circuits, passing huts and cabins familiar since his childhood, hurrying past well-known faces. The damp cloud, the thin air, the confinement of the Belt seemed to come together somewhere inside his chest.

Questions chased around his skull. Why were human materials and building methods so inadequate to resist the forces of the world? Why were human bodies so feeble in the face of those forces?

His father used to say the mine was killing them all. Humans weren’t meant to work down there, crawling around in wheelchairs at five gee.

Now his parents were dead.

Rees was still a boy. But he faced a prospect of nothing more than to labor in the kernel mines, to have his health broken by the monstrous gravity, to die young.

Shards of speculation glittered in the mud of his overtired thinking. His parents had had no better understanding of their circumstances than he had; there had been nothing but legends they could tell him before their sour deaths of overwork: children’s tales, of a Ship, a Crew, of something called Bolder’s Ring…

But his parents had had — acceptance. They, and the rest of the Belt dwellers, accepted their lot.

Only Rees seemed plagued by questions, unanswered doubts. Why couldn’t he be like everyone else? Why couldn’t he just accept and be accepted?

His arms, punctured by hot metal, ached. A vague anger suffused him. Well, why should he accept this? Why should he die, broken-down by the five gee of the Star’s kernel, without learning more, the truth of the world?

He had to find out more. And in all his universe there was only one place he could go to find it.

The Raft. Somehow he had to get to the Raft.

The shadow of the great tree slid over the Belt. A rope had uncoiled from the tree trunk and lay across the fifty yards to the Belt, brushing against the orbiting cabins. A man came shimmering confidently down the rope; he was scarred, old and muscular, almost a piece of the tree himself. The man dropped without hesitation across empty air to a cabin and began to make his way around the Belt.

A sudden determination crystallized in Rees. He hurried around the Belt to his cabin.

It took minutes to gather up some food, wrapping dried meat in bundles of cloth, filling cloth globes with water.

Then he climbed to the outer wall of his cabin.

Rees clung to his cabin by one hand. The rotation of the Belt carried the cabin steadily towards the tree’s dangling rope.

As the rope approached, a thin sweat covered his brow. Was he somehow throwing his life away in this impulsive gesture? Would he, in the end, have the courage to take the decisive step?

Staring at the magnificent tree he probed at his emotions. There was no fear. There was only elation; the future was an empty sky, within which his hopes would surely find room.

When the rope was a yard from him he grabbed at it and swarmed without hesitation off the Belt.

A file of miners clambered up to the tree, iron plates strapped to their backs. Under the tree-pilot’s supervision the plates were lashed securely to the tree rim, widely spaced. The miners descended to the Belt laden with casks of food and fresh water, delivered from the Raft in payment for the kernel metal.

Rees, watching from the foliage, stayed curled closely around a two-feet-wide branch — taking care not to cut open his palms on its knife-sharp leading edge — and he kept a layer of foliage around his body. He had no way of telling the time, but the loading of the tree must have taken several shifts.

He was wide-eyed and sleepless. He knew that his absence from work would go unremarked for at least a couple of shifts — and, he thought with a distant sadness, it might be longer before anyone cared enough to come looking for him.

Well, the world of the Belt was behind him now. Whatever dangers the future held for him, at least they would be new dangers.

In fact he only had two problems. Hunger and thirst…

Disaster had struck soon after he had found himself this hiding place among the leaves. One of the Belt workmen had stumbled across his tiny cache of supplies; thinking it belonged to the despised Raft crewmen the miner had shared the morsels among his companions. Rees had been lucky to avoid detection himself, he realized… but now he had no supplies, and the clamor of his throat and belly had come to fill his head.

When the final miner had slithered down to the Belt Pallis curled up the rope and hung it around a hook fixed to the trunk. He hated these visits to the Belt, the way he was forced to negotiate so hard with these ragged, half-starved miners. He shook his head and turned his thoughts with some relief to the flight home.

“Right, Gover, let’s see you move! I want the bowls switched to the underside of the tree, filled and lit before I’ve finished coiling this rope. Or would you rather wait for the next tree?”

Gover got to work, comparatively briskly; and soon a blanket of smoke was spreading beneath the tree, shielding the Belt and its star from view.

Pallis stood close to the trunk, his feet and hands sensitive to the excited surge of sap. It was almost as if he could sense the huge vegetable thoughts of the tree as it reacted to the darkness spreading below it. The trunk audibly hummed; the branches bit into the air; the foliage shook and swished and skitters tumbled, confused at the abrupt change of airspeed; and then, with an exhilarating surge, the great spinning platform lifted from the star. The Belt and its human misery dwindled to a toylike mote, falling slowly into the Nebula, and Pallis, hands and feet pressed against the flying wood, was where he was most happy.

His contentment lasted for about a shift and a half.

He prowled the wooden platform, moodily watching the stars slide through the silent air. The flight just wasn’t smooth. Oh, it wasn’t enough to disturb Gover’s extensive slumbers, but to Pallis’s practiced senses it was like riding a skitter in a gale. He pressed his ear to the ten-feet-high wall of the trunk; he could feel the bole whirring in its vacuum chamber as it tried to even out the tree’s rotation.

This felt like a loading imbalance… but that was impossible. He’d supervised the stowage of the cargo himself to ensure an even distribution of mass around the rim. For him not to have spotted such a gross imbalance would have been like — well, like forgetting to breathe.

Then what?

With a growl of impatience he pushed away from the trunk and stalked to the rim. He began to work around the lashed loads, methodically rechecking each plate and cask and allowing a picture of the tree’s loading to build up in his mind—

He slowed to a halt. One of the food casks had been broken into; its plastic casing was cracked in two places and half the contents were gone. Hurriedly he checked a nearby water cask. It too was broken open and empty.

He felt hot breath course through his nostrils. “Apprentice! Come here!”

The boy came slowly, his thin face twisted with apprehension.

Pallis stood immobile until Gover got within arm’s reach; then he lashed out with his right hand and grabbed the apprentice’s shoulder. Pallis pointed at the violated casks. “What do you call this?”

Gover stared at the casks with what looked like real shock. “Well, I didn’t do it, pilot. I wouldn’t be so stupid — ah!”

Pallis worked his thumb deeper into the boy’s joint, searching for the nerve. “Did I keep this food from the miners in order to allow you to feast your useless face? Why, you little bone sucker, I’ve a mind to throw you over now…”

Then he fell silent, his anger dissipating.

There was still something wrong.

The mass of the provisions taken from the casks wasn’t nearly enough to account for the disruption to the tree’s balance. And as for Gover — well, he’d been proven a thief, a liar and worse in the past; but he was right: he wasn’t nearly stupid enough for this.

Reluctantly he released the boy’s shoulder. Gover rubbed the joint, staring at him resentfully. Pallis scratched his chin. “If you didn’t take the stuff, Gover, then who did? Eh?” By the Bones, they had a stowaway.

He dropped to all fours and pressed his hands and feet against the wood of a branch. He closed his eyes and let the tiny shuddering speak to him. If the unevenness wasn’t at the rim, then where…?

Abruptly he straightened and half-ran about a quarter of the way around the rim, his long toes clutching at the foliage. He paused for a few more seconds, hands once more folded around a branch; then he made his way more slowly towards the center of the tree, stopping halfway to the trunk.

There was a little nest in the foliage. Through the bunched leaves he could see a few scraps of discolored cloth, a twist of unruly black hair, a hand dangling weightless; the hand was that of a boy or young man, he judged, but it was heavily callused and it bore a spatter of tiny wounds.

Pallis straightened to his full height. “Well, here’s our unexpected mass, apprentice. Good shift to you, sir! And would you care for your breakfast now?”

The nest exploded. Skitters whirled away from the tangle of limbs and flew away, as if indignant; and at last a boy half-stood before Pallis, eyes bleary with sleep, mouth a circle of shock.

Gover sidled up beside Pallis. “By the Bones, it’s a mine rat.”

Pallis looked from one boy to the other. The two seemed about the same age, but where Gover was well-fed and ill-muscled, the stowaway had ribs like the anatomical model of a Scientist, and his muscles were like an adult’s; and his hands were the battered product of hours of labor. The lad’s eyes were dark-ringed. Pallis remembered the imploded foundry and wondered what horrors this young miner had already seen. Now the boy filled his chest defiantly, his hands bunching into fists.

Gover sneered, arms folded. “What do we do, pilot? Throw him to the Boneys?”

Pallis turned on him with a snarl. “Have you cleaned out the fire bowls yet? No? Then do it. Now!”

With a last, baleful glare at the stowaway, Gover moved clumsily away across the tree.

The stowaway watched him go with some relief; then turned back to Pallis.

The pilot raised his hands, palms upwards. “Take it easy. I’m not going to hurt you… Tell me your name.”

The boy’s mouth worked but no sound emerged; he licked cracked lips, and managed to say: “Rees.”

“All right. I’m Pallis. I’m the tree-pilot. Do you know what that means?”

“I… yes.”

“By the Bones, you’re dry, aren’t you? No wonder you stole that water. You did, didn’t you? And the food?”

The boy nodded hesitantly. “I’m sorry. I’ll pay you back—”

“When? After you return to the Belt?”

The boy shook his head, a glint in his eye. “No. I’m not going back.”

Pallis frowned. “What about your parents?”

“They’re dead. Both of them.”

Pallis bunched his fists and rested them on his hips. “Listen to me. You’ll have to go back. You’ll be allowed to stay on the Raft until the next supply tree; but then you’ll be shipped back. You’ll have to work your passage, I expect…”

Rees shook his head again, his face a mask of determination.

Pallis studied the young miner, an unwelcome sympathy growing inside him. “Well, I’m stuck with you for now. Come on.”

He led the boy across the tree surface, towards his little stock of rations.

After a dozen yards they disturbed a spray of skitters; the little creatures whirled up into Rees’s face and he stepped back, startled. Pallis laughed. “Don’t worry. Skitters are harmless. They are the seeds from which the trees grow…”

Rees nodded. “I guessed that.”

Pallis arched an eyebrow. “You did?”

“Yes. You can see the shape’s the same; it’s just a difference of scale…”

Pallis arched an eyebrow. Smart lad.

The boy ate, as if he’d never been fed.

After letting the boy sleep for a quarter shift Pallis put him to work. Soon Rees was bent over a fire bowl, scraping ash and soot from the iron with shaped blades of wood. Pallis found that his work was fast and complete, supervised or un-supervised. Gover suffered by comparison… and by the looks he shot at Rees, Pallis suspected Gover knew it.

Rees joined Pallis and collected his shift-end rations. The young miner peered absently around at the empty sky. As the tree climbed up towards the Raft, away from the Core and towards the edge of the Nebula, the air was perceptibly brightening.

“Come on,” Pallis said. “Let me show you something.”

He led the boy towards the trunk of the tree.

Surreptitiously he watched as the boy half-walked across the foliated platform, his feet seeking out the points of good purchase and then lodging in the foliage, so allowing him to “stand” on the tree. The contrast with Gover’s clumsy stumbling was marked. Pallis found himself wondering what kind of woodsman the lad would make.

They reached the trunk. Rees stood before the tall cylinder and ran his fingers over the gnarled wood. Pallis hid a smile. “Put your ear against the wood. Go on.”

Rees did so with a look of puzzlement — which evolved into an almost comic delight.

“That’s the bole turning, inside the trunk. You see, the tree is alive, right to its core.”

Rees’s eyes were wide.

Rees woke from a comfortable sleep in his nest of foliage. Pallis hung over him, silhouetted by a bright sky. “Shift change,” the pilot said briskly. “Hard work ahead for all of us; docking and unloading and—”

“Docking?” Rees shook his head clear of sleep. “Then we’ve arrived?”

Pallis grinned. “Isn’t that obvious?”

He moved aside. Behind him the Raft hung huge in the sky. A single star was poised some tens of miles above the Raft, a turbulent ball of yellow fire a mile wide, and the huge metal structure cast a broadening shadow down through miles of dusty air.

Under Pallis’s direction Rees and Gover stoked the fire bowls and worked their way across the surface of the tree, waving large, light blankets over the billowing smoke. Pallis studied the canopy of smoke with a critical eye; never satisfied, he snapped and growled at the boys. But, steadily and surely, the tree’s rise through the Nebula was molded into a slow curve towards the rim of the Raft.

The Raft grew in the sky until it blocked out half the Nebula. From below it showed as a ragged disc a half-mile wide; metal plates scattered highlights from the stars and light leaked through dozens of apertures in the deck. As the tree sailed up to the rim the Raft foreshortened into a patchwork ellipse; Rees could see the sooty scars of welding around the edges of the nearer plates, and as his eye tracked across the ceilinglike surface the plates crowded into a blur, with the far side of the disc a level horizon.

At last, with a rush of air, the tree rose above the rim and the upper surface of the Raft began to open out before Rees. He found himself drawn to the edge of the tree; he buried his hands in the foliage and stared, open-mouthed, as a torrent of color, noise and movement broke over him.

The Raft was an enormous dish that brimmed with life. Points of light were sprinkled over its surface. The deck was studded with buildings of all shapes and sizes, constructed of wood panels or corrugated metal and jumbled together like toys.

A confusion of smells assaulted Rees’s senses — sharp ozone from giant machines around the rim, wood smoke from a thousand chimneys, the hint of exotic cooking scents from the cabins. And people — more than Rees could count, so many that the Belt population would be easily lost among them — people walked about the Raft in great streams; and knots of running children exploded here and there into bursts of laughter.

He made out sturdy pyramids fixed to the deck, waist-high. And out of each pyramid a cable soared straight upwards; Rees tilted his face back, following the line of the cables, and he gasped. To each cable was tethered the trunk of a tree. To Rees one flying tree had been wonder enough. Now, over the Raft, he was faced with a mighty forest. Every tethering cable was vertical and quite taut, and Rees could almost feel the exertion of the harnessed trees as they strained against the pull of the Core.

A hundred questions tumbled through Rees’s mind. What would it be like to walk on that metal surface? What must it have been like for the Crew who had built the Raft, hanging in the void above the Core?

But now wasn’t the time; there was still work to do. Pallis was already bellowing at Gover. Rees got to his feet, wrapping his toes in the foliage like a regular woodsman.

Pallis joined him, and they labored at a fire bowl together.

“Rees, you can’t have had any real idea what the Raft is like. So… why did you do it? What were you running from?”

Rees considered the question. “I wasn’t running from anything, pilot. The mine is a tough place, but it was my home. No. I left to find the answer.”

“The answer? To what?”

“To why the Nebula is dying.”

Pallis studied the serious young miner and felt a chill settle on his spine.

How much education did the average miner get? Pallis doubted Rees was even literate. As soon as a child was strong enough he or she was forced into the foundry or down to the crushing surface of the iron star, to begin a life of muscle-sapping toil…

And the Belt’s children were forced there by the economics of the Nebula, he reminded himself harshly; economics which he — Pallis — helped to keep in place.

He shook his head, troubled. Pallis had never accepted the theory, common on the Raft, that the miners were a species of sub-human, fit only for the toil they endured. What was the life span of the miners? Thirty thousand shifts? Less, maybe half of Pallis’s own age already?

What a fine woodsman Rees would make… or, he admitted ruefully, maybe a better Scientist.

A vague plan began to form in his mind.

Maybe Pallis could help Rees find a place on the Raft.

It wouldn’t be easy. Rees would face a lifetime of hostility from the likes of Gover. And the Raft was no bed of flowers and leaves; its economy, too, had declined with the slow choking of the Nebula.

But Rees deserved a chance. And Rees was a smart kid. Maybe, Pallis mused, just maybe he might actually find some answers. Was it possible?

“Now, then, miner,” Pallis said briskly, “we’ve got a tree to fly. Let’s get the bowls brimming; I want a canopy up there so thick I could walk about on it. All right?”

The tree had passed the highest layer of the forest. The Raft turned from a landscape into an island in the air, crowned by a mass of shifting foliage. The sky above Rees seemed darker than usual, so that he felt he was suspended at the very edge of the Nebula, looking down over the mists surrounding the Nebula’s Core.

And in all that universe of air the only sign of humanity was the Raft, a scrap of metal suspended in miles of air.

His heart lifted, bursting with the exhilaration of a thousand questions.

“Did Rees find his answers?”

Eve just smiled, and the images, of the glowing Nebula and its mile-wide stars, faded from my view, receding into a scrap of crimson light, a spark lost in the greater blaze of human history…[5]

The assaults continued, waves of them, generations of humans battering against the great Xeelee defenses… and leaving shards of humanity stranded in the great spaces around the Xeelee Prime Radiant.

At last, even those broken shards became weapons of war.

The Tyranny of Heaven

Rodi climbed through the hatch and into the flitter. The craft was a box the size of a small room. He threaded his way through the interior.

There was a girl in one of the pilot seats. She turned. Tall and muscular, she wasn’t much older than Rodi’s twenty years.

Rodi tripped over a locker.

The girl’s eyes glittered with amusement. “Take it easy. You’re Rodi. Right? I’m Thet.”

His face hot, Rodi took the seat beside her. “Glad to meet you.” The instrument panel before him looked utterly alien.

“Well, buckle in.” Thet punched fat buttons. Monitors showed muscles contracting in the Ark’s hull. “And don’t be so nervous.”

“I’m not.”

“Of course you are. I never understand why. You’ve taken flitters outside the Ark before, haven’t you?”

“Sure.” He tried not to sound defensive. “On inter-Ark hops. But this is my first mission drop — my first time out of hyperspace. It’s a little different.”

She raised fine eyebrows. “We didn’t evolve in hyperspace.”

“Maybe. But it’s all I know—”

An orifice in the hull opened and exploded at them; the flitter surged into hyperspace. It was like being born.

A Virtual image of the Ark swam into their monitors. Holism Ark was a Spline ship: a rolling, fleshy sphere encrusted with blisters. It was a living being, Rodi mused, and it looked like it.

He wondered briefly what those blisters on the hull were. They couldn’t be seen from within the Ark…

The flitter receded rapidly. Hyperspace smeared the Ark’s image.

Now more Arks came into view. The flitter skirted islands of huge flesh as it worked its way through the fleet.

At last the flitter surged into clear hyperspace; Thet swung the flitter about.

Holism Ark was lost in a blurred wall of ten thousand Arks that cut the Universe in half. This was the Exaltation of the Integrality. Rodi imagined he could hear a thrumming as the great armada forged onwards; flitters skimmed between the huge hulls and rained into three-space.

“We’re privileged to see this,” Rodi said.

“Definitely,” said Thet laconically. “A sight that hasn’t changed for three thousand years.” She snapped the flitter away; the Exaltation became a blur in the distance. Her shaven head gleamed in the cabin lights. “I’ll tell you how we’re privileged. After a hundred generations it’s us who are around as the Exaltation reaches Bolder’s Ring, the true Prime Radiant of the Xeelee. And so the sky here is full of lost human colonies. Bits of ancient, failed assaults. Instead of a dozen missionary drops a century we’re getting a hundred a year. Which is why they’re pressing almost anybody into service.”

“Thanks,” he said drily.

She grinned, showing teeth. “So I’m your tutor on your first drop. And I’m not what you expected. Am I?”

Rodi said nothing.

“Look — I’m resourceful, a good pilot. I’m no great thinker, okay?… but you’re different. Top marks in the seminary, Gren tells me. You should soon surpass me. And with all that understanding you should have no fear. The Integrality says that the death of an individual is unimportant.”

“Yes.” That was a child’s precept; he clutched the thought and felt his anxiety recede.

“And you do believe in the Integrality. Don’t you?” Her voice was sly.

Was she mocking him? “Of course. Don’t you?”

She didn’t reply. She stabbed at the control panel. The flitter popped out of hyperspace.

Stars exploded around him. Half of them were colored blue.

He gasped. Thet laughed.

It’s a simulation, he told himself. Just another sim.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Thet watched with amused contempt. “Get your bearings.”

The stars blurred together. Behind him they were tinged china blue. Ahead of him they formed a mist that hid… something, a hint of a torus shape—

“Bolder’s Ring is ahead,” he breathed.

“How do you know?”

Because that was the way everything was falling.

Thet said, “We’ve been space-going for a hundred and fifty millennia, probably. And yet we’re still children at the feet of the Xeelee. Makes you sick, doesn’t it?”

Rodi shrugged. “That’s why we’ve been trying to wreck that thing for almost as long. Envy.”

Thet paged through images on her monitor. “Shocking. And of course we of the Integrality are here to put it all right… ha! There’s our goal.” The screen contained a single spark of chlorophyll green. “Human life… or near enough to show up. A worldful of straying lambs. Right, Rodi?” And she drove the flitter through the crowd of stars.

On Holism Ark there were sim rooms of Earth. This little world, Rodi decided, was like a folded-up bit of Earth. They swept over oceans that sparkled in the jostling starlight — and then flew into an impossible dawn.

It was impossible because there was no sun.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Thet murmured. The light was diffusing down from a glowing sky. “Where’s that damn sunlight coming from?… And the planet’s only a quarter Earth’s size, gravity a sixth standard — too low for this thick layer of air…”

Rodi smiled. The little world was like a toy.

Thet poked buttons in triumph. “Contact! About time…”

A Virtual tank filled up with a smiling male face, long and gracefully austere. He spoke; Rodi picked out maybe one word in two. After a few seconds he flicked the translator button mounted in his thumbnail.

“…this equipment’s a little dusty, I’m afraid; we don’t get too many visitors. It’s only chance I was in the museum when the alarm chimed—”

“We represent the Exaltation of the Integrality,” said Thet formally. “We come from beyond the stars. We are human like yourselves.”

The man laughed; his eyes’ folds crinkled. “Thank you, my dear. You’re welcome to land and talk to us. But you’ll find we’re quite sophisticated. Use this signal as a beacon. The name of this area is Tycho…”

Thet let Rodi pilot the flitter out of orbit. Fifty miles above the surface the little craft shuddered; Rodi’s palms grew slick with sweat.

“That wasn’t your fault, surprisingly,” Thet said calmly. “We just passed through a kind of membrane. It’s — healing — behind us. Now we know how they keep the atmosphere in. And maybe this is where the sunshine comes from. Interesting.”

The Tycho museum perched at the summit of a green-clad mountain. A tall figure waved. The mountain was at the center of a plain which glistened with lakes and trees. The plain was walled by a circle of jagged hills. As they descended the hills dipped over the horizon.

Rodi landed neatly.

The air carried the scent of pine. Through the day-lit membrane Rodi could see stars; towards the horizon they were stained blue. He breathed deeply, invigorated.

Thet whooped. “I love this dinky gravity.” She did a neat double back somersault, her long legs flexing.

Their host walked around the curve of the little museum. He wore a white coverall and he was at least eight feet tall. He smiled. “Welcome,” he said. “My name is Darby.”

Thet landed breathlessly and introduced herself and Rodi. “Come to my home,” said Darby. “My family will be more than excited to meet you. And you can tell us all about your… integrality.”

Rodi looked around for a transport. There was none.

Darby said nothing. He held out his hands. Like children, Rodi and Thet took hold.

Rodi saw Darby’s coverall ripple, as if in a sudden breeze.

The museum, the flitter slid away.

Rodi looked down. He was flying, as if in a glass elevator. He felt no fear. Hand in hand they soared over the curves of the little world.

Darby’s home was a tentlike, translucent structure; it was at the heart of a light-filled forest. The days were as long as Ark days, adhering to some ancient, common standard. Thet and Rodi spent four days with Darby’s family.

Thet looked out of place in all this domesticity: squat, brusque, embarrassed by kindness. She let Rodi talk to the adults while she sat on the leaf-strewn ground telling Integrality parables to Darby’s two children. Each child towered over Thet. Their earnestness made Rodi smile.

On the final day Darby took Rodi by the hand. “Come with me. I’d like to show you a little more of our world.”

They flew soundlessly. Houseboats floated on circular oceans; clumps of dwellings grew by the banks of rivers. Everywhere people waved at them. “This is a peaceful place, you see, Rodi,” Darby said. “There are only a few thousand of us.”

“Yes. And this orderly world has risen from the debris of war… just as the Integrality teaches us to expect. As I’ve told you, the Integrality is a movement based on the inter-meshing of all things. Local reductions in entropy occur on all scales throughout the Universe, from the growth of a child to the convergence of a galaxy cluster. Order is to be celebrated…”

Irritation touched Darby’s face briefly. He said nothing. Rodi fell silent, faintly embarrassed.

At a savannah’s heart sat a simple dome. “This is a place we call Tranquility,” said Darby. “What I’m going to show you is a kind of monument. On seeing this perhaps you’ll understand why your sermons are a little out of place here.”

They landed like leaves.

Rodi peered through the clear dome wall. Boulders littered a patch of bald earth. There was a craft, a spiderlike structure as tall as a man. Gold foil gleamed through years of dust. Its colors faded beyond recognition, a flag lay in the soil.

“Here is the original surface of the planet, preserved through the terraforming,” said Darby. “Airless.”

“The craft looks very old. What is it?”

“Human, of course. This is one of our first spacecraft. Do you know where you are yet?”

Rodi turned and met Darby’s mild eyes.

“This is the Moon,” Darby said. “The original satellite of Earth. It was used in some ancient assault on the Ring… abandoned here, millions of light years from home, and terraformed by the handful of survivors.” He smiled. “Rodi, every glance at the night sky tells us where we are and how we got here. We live surrounded by the rubble of the past, the foolish sacrifices of war.

“We have had to come to terms with this, you see. We have made our peace with the Universe. Perhaps your Integrality has something to learn from us.”

Rodi stared for long minutes at the ancient craft. Then Darby took his arm. “I’ll take you back to your flitter. Your companion is already waiting for you.”

Hand in hand, they flew to the grass-coated walls of Tycho Crater.

The flitter soared through hyperspace.

“Those damn kids taught me a song,” Thet said. She recited: “We may with more successful hope resolve / To wage by force or guile eternal war / Irreconcilable to our grand Foe… That’s all there was.”

Rodi frowned. “Strange sort of kids’ song.”

“Sounds very old, doesn’t it? The kids say they learn it from older children, and so it’s passed on.” Punching the controls briskly, she said, “Well, that’s your first drop. Wasn’t so bad, was it? Next one solo, maybe.”

Sunk in depression, Rodi tapped at the data desk built into his thumbnail. “What do you know about glotto-chronology?”

Thet snorted. “What do you think?”

“It’s one of our standard dating mechanisms. Starting from a common root, the languages of two human groups will diverge by a fifth every thousand years.” Tiny numbers flickered over his nail. “About half of Darby’s vocabulary is close to ours. That makes the colony about three thousand years old… This war has endured for millennia.”

“We know that.” Thet’s brow furrowed as she concentrated on her piloting. “This is actually a bit tricky. The inseparability net is breaking up a little; the guidance beacons are flickering… there are ripples in hyperspace; large mass movements somewhere. A quake on a nearby neutron star?”

Rodi found himself blurting, “Is it always like that?”

“What?”

“Darby…”

“What did you expect? To convert him?”

Rodi thought it over. “Yes.”

She laughed at that. She was still laughing as they passed into the warm interior of the Ark.

Holism Ark was a sphere miles wide. Its human fabric was sustained from huge chambers strung around the equator, where the Ark’s spin gave the illusion of gravity. There were industrial zones, biotech tanks, sim rooms, health and exercise facilities. The weightless axis was a tunnel glowing with light. Tiled corridors branched away to riddle the Ark.

The flitter docked at a pole. Rodi slipped his arms into a set of light wings and swam along the axis. He was due to meet his seminary tutor, Gren, to discuss his voyage, and he tried to lift his mood. He stared around at the bustling life of the Ark: people coasting to and from work, children fluttering stubby wings in some complex game. Rodi felt isolated from it all, as if his senses were clouded by his depression.

There was a free fall common room at the center of the Ark. Gren met him there, tethered to a floating table. Gren was a round, comfortable man. Over a coffee globe he congratulated Rodi. “I was interested by that bit of doggerel Thet picked up,” he said. “Did you know we’ve found similar fragments before?”

“Really?” Rodi hung up his wings and fiddled with his table tether.

“Strange, isn’t it? These scattered bits of humanity slavishly maintaining their scraps of verse. We’ve a data store full of them… But what’s it all for?” Gren put on a look of comic puzzlement.

Rodi drew a coffee globe from the table’s dispenser. “Gren, why are the Ark’s corridors tiled?”

Gren sipped his drink and eyed Rodi. He said carefully, “Because it’s more comfortable that way.”

“For us, yes. But this Ark is a Spline ship. How must the Spline feel? Once the Spline were free traders. Now we’ve sanitized this being’s guts and built controls into its consciousness. Gren, we preach the wholeness of life, the growth to completeness. Is that a suitable way to treat a fellow creature?”

“Ah. Your first drop didn’t turn out as you expected.” He smiled. “You’re not the first to react like this.”

Rodi cradled the coffee globe’s warmth close to his chest. “Please take me seriously, Gren. Is our philosophy, this great crusade to the Ring, a sham?”

“You know it isn’t. The Integrality is a movement based on centuries of hard human experience. It has quasi-religious elements. Even the words we use — ‘seminary,’ ‘mission’ — have the scent of ancient faiths. That’s no sham; it’s quite deliberate. We want the Integrality to be vibrant enough to replace other faiths… especially man’s dark passion to die on a mass scale.”

“War—”

Gren thumped the table, his round face absurdly serious. “Yes, war. And that’s why the resources of planets were spent to send the Exaltation here, to the site of man’s greatest and most futile war.

“Rodi, come to terms with your doubts. Humanity is large: scattered, diverse. You found the Moon people discouraging. Well, they have found their own peace. That is not a threat to the validity of our crusade.”

Another table drifted by. A young couple whispered into each other’s mouths. Rodi watched them absently, thinking of his parents. Both of them worked in the Ark’s biotech tanks. He recalled their pride when he was selected for the seminary, and then for the missionary cohort…

Gren was smiling again. “Anyway, you haven’t long to brood before you go out again.”

Rodi looked up, startled. “You still think I’m suitable?”

“Of course. Do we want ignorant fanatics? We want young people who can think, boy.

“Now. There’s a neutron star, not far from here. Spinning very fast… we’ve picked up a signal from its surface.”

Rodi stared. “A human signal?”

Gren laughed kindly. “Well, of course a human signal. Why else would we send you?”

Rodi finished his drink and pushed the globe back into the table. “I guess I’d better find Thet…”

Gren laid a warm hand on his arm. “Rodi, this time you’re on your own. Go and get some sleep; you’ve a few hours to spare—”

The flitter seemed empty without Thet.

The Spline’s orifice dilated and Rodi returned to hyperspace. He began to thread his way out of the Exaltation, keeping his breath carefully level.

A Virtual sparkled into existence; Thet grinned. “Going solo this time, kid? I just called to wish you luck.” Rodi thanked her. “Listen, Rodi… don’t let me get you down. I rag everybody, and my opinions are my own. Right? And you did okay, down there on the Moon. Be safe.” She winked at him and the Virtual dissipated.

Feeling warmer, Rodi dropped into three-space.

The neutron star was one of a binary pair. It was the remnant of a blue-white giant, once so bright it must have made its companion star cast a shadow. Perhaps there had been planets.

The giant had exploded.

Planets evaporated like dew and layers of the companion star blasted away. The giant’s remnant collapsed into a wizened, spinning cinder as massive as Earth’s sun but barely ten miles across.

The new neutron star dragged down material from its companion and rotated ever faster. The spin deformed it until at last it was virtually a disc, its rim moving at a third the speed of light. Spin effects there canceled out the star’s ferocious gravity and a layer of normal matter began to accrete…

A human ship had blundered here, scarred by some forgotten war; Rodi found a battered wreck in close orbit around the neutron star. The crew had no way back to hyperspace and no way to call for help.

And in this dismal system there had been only one place that could conceivably sustain human life…

In Rodi’s monitors the neutron star was a plate of red-hot charcoal. A point on the rim was emitting green laser light, picking out a message in something called Morse code. The message was one word of ancient English. “Mayday. Mayday…”

Rodi set up a reply, in the same old tongue and code. “I represent the Exaltation of the Integrality. What is mayday?”

The reply came a day later.

“Apologies are offered for the delay. It took time to locate the Comms Officer. I am the Comms Officer. What do you want?”

“My name is Rodi. I have traveled here in an Exaltation of Arks. I have brought you good news of the Integrality—”

“Are you human?”

“Yes, of course. How long have you been stranded?”

“Stranded where?”

Rodi pulled at his chin. “Would you like to hear of events in the galaxies? Of the wars with the Xeelee?”

“What are galaxies? — Cancel question. Please understand that this is the first time the Comms System has evoked a reply—”

“Then why have you maintained it?”

“Because we always have. The role of Comms Officer is handed from mother to daughter. We know we came from somewhere else. The Comms System is the only link with this other place, our origin. How could we abandon it? Are you in this other place?”

“Yes. You are not alone.”

“How reassuring.”

Rodi raised an eyebrow. Sarcasm? “Please describe your world.”

“What world?”

It took some time to achieve a common understanding.

The stranded crew had observed the layer of soupy liquid at the star rim. The liquid was full of complex molecules, left over from the supernova’s fusion fury.

It was their only hope.

With astonishing audacity they had terraformed the ring-shaped sea. Then they began to mold their own unborn children.

Their descendants swam like fish in a dull red toroidal ocean, chattering English. They didn’t need hands or tools; only the old Comms System had been left for them, lasing its message to the skies. Rodi imagined the Comms Officer tapping a broad, unwearing key with his mouth or tongue.

Rodi sent down a small, sturdy probe. It was a passing novelty among the fish-folk. Rodi wondered if they thought he was swimming somewhere inside.

There was a death among the fish-folk. A corpse fell from a school of wailing relatives and settled slowly to the star’s glowing surface.

Rodi’s probe took a tissue sample from the corpse.

The fish-folk were beyond the reach of the glotto-chronology dating technique. Rodi turned to genetic analysis. Two groups on Earth will show divergence of genetic structure at a rate of one percent every five million years.

Rodi found that the fish-folk had swum their ocean for fifty thousand years.

That appalled him. How long had this damn Xeelee war dragged on? How many human lives had been wasted?

The fish-folk weren’t too impressed by the Integrality.

“All mankind is joined in freedom,” said Rodi. “The worlds in home space are joined by inseparability links into a neural network; decisions flow through the net and reflect the wills of all, not just one person or one group…”

And so on.

The Comms Officer was silent for a long time. Then: “What you say means little to us.”

“Your world is unchanging. You are isolated. You are cut out of the great events which shape the greater human history.”

“But great events mark our lives,” said the Comms Officer, and Rodi wondered if he had given offense. “Our convocations, for instance. There are places where we swim in concert and cause the ocean to sing. We did this not long ago.”

That puzzled Rodi. It sounded like a starquake, a sudden collapse of the crust; that would make the whole star ring like a bell.

Could they cause a starquake?

Perhaps they had some way of manipulating the star’s ferocious magnetic field. And after all, a quake had disrupted the Exaltation inseparability net not long ago.

After a fortnight Rodi took his leave of his friend.

“Wait,” the Comms Officer said unexpectedly. “I have a message to give you.” And he transmitted: “Our grand Foe, / Who now triumphs, and in the excess of joy / Sole reigning holds the tyranny of heaven.”

“What does it mean?” asked Rodi.

“Unknown.”

“Then why do you send it?”

“Every Comms Officer is taught to send it.”

“Why?”

“What is ‘heaven’?”

“Unknown.”

Rodi thought of the rhyme the Moon children had taught Thet. To wage by force or guile eternal war / Irreconcilable to our grand Foe, / Who now triumphs, and in the excess of joy…

The pieces fit together, he realized, astonished.

He transmitted his conclusion to Holism Ark for analysis.

Rodi went through the motions of lifting the flitter back to hyperspace, his thoughts clouded.

Once more his mission hadn’t unfolded as he’d been taught to expect.

The humans in this region had been forced to find their own ways to come to terms with the events that had stranded them. If they hadn’t they couldn’t have survived. So — why did they need the Integrality? — or a junior missionary like himself?

Was the Integrality’s crusade meaningless?…

The Exaltation’s formation had changed.

His speculations driven from his mind, he stared at his monitors. Around Holism Ark the fleet’s symmetrical pattern had been distorted into a wedge; at the tip the Arks’ fleshy walls were almost touching. Flitters scurried between the Arks; hundreds of closed-beam inseparability net messages radiated away from Holism Ark.

What was happening?

He pushed into Holism Ark. The maintenance bay was deserted. He flew through an axis filled with a harsh light. People rushed past, wings fluttering.

Men and women came along the axis shoving a cannon-like piece of equipment. Rodi recognized a machine-shop heavy-duty laser. He had to press against the wall to allow the team to pass. Their eyes passed blankly over him.

Rodi noticed a fist-sized, fleshy lump on the back of the neck of the nearest man, at the top of his spine.

The freefall common room was unrecognizable. Rodi clung to a wall and stared around. The floating tables were being cleared away; he saw a group of children shooed through the commotion.

There were more bulges on the spinal columns of the crew. Even the children were affected. Some sort of sickness?

A hundred crewmen worked to bolt together a huge, cubical lattice. Eventually, Rodi realized, it would fill the common room. Medical devices and supplies were strapped to struts. Rough hands pushed a man-sized bundle of blankets into the lattice. Then another, and a third…

Crew members in sterile masks unwrapped the bundles.

Suddenly Rodi saw it.

This was a hospital. It was being built in the soft heart of the Ark — the most protected place in case of attack. And towards the hull they were taking heavy-duty lasers — to use as weapons?

Holism Ark was preparing for war.

Rodi’s head pounded and there was a metallic taste at the back of his throat.

Thet came sweeping across the bustling space, towing a small package of clothes.

Rodi pushed away from the wall and grabbed her arm.

“The philosopher returns,” Thet said, grinning. Her eyes sparkled and her face was flushed.

There was a growth at the top of her spine.

“Thet… what’s happening?”

“I’m going to Unity Ark. As a Battle Captain. Isn’t it fantastic?”

“Battle? Against who?”

“The Xeelee. Who else? Why do you think we came all this way?”

Rodi tightened his grip on her upper arm. “We came for the Integrality. Remember? We came to remove war, not to wage it.”

She laughed in his face, her mouth wide. “That’s yesterday, Rodi. It’s all gone. And you know who we have to thank? You. Isn’t that ironic?” With fingers like steel she prised open his hand and kicked away.

“Where’s Gren?”

“In the sanatorium,” she called back. “And, Rodi… that’s your fault too.”

Rodi hung there for long minutes. Then he turned to the makeshift hospital.

Gren lay in a honeycomb of suffering people. Bandaging swathed his neck.

Rodi touched the shrunken face. Gren’s eyes flickered open. His face creased as he recognized Rodi. He whispered: “…our grand Foe, / Who now triumphs, and in the excess of joy / Sole reigning holds the tyranny of heaven!” He grimaced. “You have to admire the planning. Over thousands of centuries, even as humans died before the Xeelee, they hid those words among thousands of fragments of verse, and built an epic deception…”

“Please,” Rodi said miserably, “I don’t understand any of this.”

Gren stirred. “I’m sorry, Rodi. The truth is that the Integrality is a fraud, an epic deception spanning millennia. Our mission was a lie which has allowed this huge armada to penetrate Xeelee space, its true purpose unknown even to generations of crew.

“The reassembled poetry was the key, you see. Hearing those words ignited something in each of us — something locked in the genetic code that defines us. We began to suffer explosive growths—”

Rodi fingered his own smooth neck.

“You’re a lucky one,” Gren whispered. “It doesn’t always work. A tenth of us are unaffected. Perhaps two-thirds have been — programed. Like Thet. And the rest of us are dying.”

Rodi turned away.

Gren said, “No, Rodi. Hear the rest. The growths are nervous tissue. They contain information… it’s like a false memory. And an obsession. I walked to a wall and touched tiles in a certain way; control panels unfolded — and I knew how to work weapons mounted in the hull… The Exaltation is a deception, the message of the Integrality a way to enable a war fleet to approach the Ring.

“Your poetry is being spread from Holism by closed inseparability net. Not all the Exaltation has yet been infected. But… but finally…” His rheumy eyes fluttered closed.

Rodi shook frail shoulders. “Gren… tell me what to do. We’ve got to stop this—”

Gren’s mouth gaped, spittle looping between his lips.

Holism Ark had become an alien place. Rodi watched weapons pods erupting from walls still coated with uplifting Integrality slogans.

He thought of trying to find his parents. He envisaged their grisly welcome, overlaid with spinal knots and blank, driven faces.

He shuddered and swam towards the flitter hangars. There was no way he could influence events here. Perhaps if he made his way to the battle site…

Then what?

He readied the flitter for launch, trying to lose himself in activity.

He skimmed the surface of the Ark; the blisters which had puzzled him earlier had now opened up to reveal the snouts of weapons and guidance sensors.

He pulled away. Much of the Exaltation, he saw, was still unaffected and held its formation. He flew to the tip of the flying wedge.

For the first time in three thousand years, the great Arks were leaving hyperspace.

His heart heavy, he swept ahead of the fleet and dropped into three-space.

He was in a mist of blue-stained stars. A torus glowed: Bolder’s Ring, still hundreds of light years away but already spanning the sky.

He pushed towards the Ring.

The flitter passed through the last veil of crushed matter and entered the clear space at the bottom of the Ring’s gravity well… and for a few seconds, despite everything, Rodi’s breath grew short with wonder.

The Ring, a tangle of cosmic string, glittered as it rotated. There was a milky place at its very center, a hole ripped in the fabric of space by that monstrous, whirling mass.

Xeelee were everywhere.

Ships miles wide swept over the artifact’s sparkling planes, endlessly constructing and shaping. Rodi watched a horde of craft using cherry-red beams to herd a star, an orange giant, into a soft, slow collision with the Ring. The star’s structure was breaking up as cosmic string ripped into its flank—

A dozen flesh-pale spheres hurtled over Rodi’s head, spitting fire.

They were Spline: the warships of the Integrality. They tore towards the star drovers and battle was joined.

At first the humans had the advantage of surprise. The ponderous Xeelee construction ships scattered in confusion. One of them was caught in the cross-fire of two Arks; Rodi could see its structure melt and smolder. More human ships dropped out of hyperspace and the battle spread.

But now a Spline ship splashed open. Rodi watched people wriggle in vacuum, soaked by spurts of Spline blood.

A Xeelee nightfighter covered the wreck with wings a hundred miles wide.

There were nightfighters all around the battle site. Fire bit into the sides of the laboring Spline.

It was a massacre.

Rodi could not bear to watch. Each Ark was a world, millennia old, carrying families… He increased the scale of his monitors, turned the battle into a game of toys.

But now the Xeelee fighters pulled away. They folded their wings and hovered outside the mist of debris, almost aloof.

The human ships tore into the defenseless construction vessels. Out of control, the orange star splashed against the Ring surface.

The Arks withdrew to hyperspace. One of them whirled as if in jubilation, spitting fire in all directions. Wrecks sailed into clumsy orbits around the Ring.

The Xeelee fighters departed, wings shimmering.

Rodi closed his eyes.

This had been no triumph for the humans. The Xeelee had given them a meaningless victory; they had simply not wished to slaughter.

Couldn’t the human crews see that? Would this happen again and again until every Ark was disabled, every human life lost?

No. He couldn’t let it occur. And, he began to realize, there was a way he could prevent it.

He opened his eyes, rubbed his face, and lifted the flitter to hyperspace.

The neutron star scraped the surface of its companion, just as it had in that dream time before the metamorphosis. “Integrality for the Comms Officer—”

“Greetings, Rodi from the Integrality.”

Rodi, in broken bits of old English, described the futile battle.

The Comms Officer mulled it over. “I understand little… only that people are dying for a foolish purpose.”

“But with your help, I can avert many deaths.”

“How?”

“Not all the Exaltation has been… contaminated. The virus of words is spreading via inseparability net links. If we break those links, the spread will stop.”

“And how can we disrupt this inseparability net?”

“Cause a starquake.”

He had to expand, to explain what he meant.

The Comms Officer hesitated. “Rodi, there are two things you should know. We cause these events for specific religious and sexual reasons. They are not — a sport. Second, many of us will lose our lives.”

“I know what I’m asking.”

A monitor flashed: another craft had dropped out of hyperspace near him. A Virtual tank filled up with a grinning face.

The craft was Unity Ark. The face was Thet’s.

She said, “They told me your flitter was gone. It wasn’t hard to work out where you’d be. You’re planning sabotage, aren’t you?”

Rodi stared at her.

“Are we still in contact, Rodi of the Integrality?”

“Yes, Comms Officer…”

“Rodi, you have one minute to begin your approach to Unity. After that we open fire. Do you understand?”

“Comms Officer, what is your answer?”

“I must consult.”

“Please hurry. I am desperate.”

Thet’s smile broadened as the minute passed. Rodi realized that the metamorphosis was a liberation for her; she made a much better warrior than missionary.

“Time’s up, Rodi.”

“Integrality? We will do as you say.”

“Thank you!”

And Rodi slammed the flitter into hyperspace; Thet snarled.

The Exaltation was beginning to split up.

The Arks, the metamorphosed battleships, continued to drop into three-space… but they returned battered and bleeding, and there were fewer each time.

The bulk of the fleet, now isolated from infection, cruised on its way.

Rodi probed at his feelings. Had he betrayed his race by wrecking this grand design?

But the stratagem itself had been a betrayal — of the generations who had lived and died in the Exaltation, and, yes, of the ideal of the Integrality itself.

He wondered if Gren’s hypothesis, of a key embedded in fragments of poetry, could hold truth. It seemed fantastic… and yet the fragments of verse had indeed been laid there, like a trail. Perhaps there were a dozen keys, scattered across the light years and centuries, reinforcing each other — some perhaps even embedded in the structure of the space through which the Exaltation must pass.

Or perhaps, Rodi thought bleakly, no key was necessary. He thought of Thet. She, in retrospect, had been all too willing to throw over the ideals of the Integrality, and indulge in warfare once more — key or no key.

But the perpetrators of this epochal plot had been too clever. In their search for a fine lie they had stumbled on a truth — the truth at the heart of the Integrality’s philosophy — and that truth, Rodi realized, was driving him to act as he did.

And so in the end it was the truth which had betrayed them.

Rodi would never see his parents again.

But the Exaltation would go on. He could join another Ark, and—

Thet’s voice hissed through the distorted inseparability net. “I know… you’ve done…”

Unity Ark loomed in his monitors, its bulk cutting him off from the Exaltation.

“Thet. There’s no point—”

The flitter slammed.

“…next time…”

Roaring with frustration he dropped into three-space, emerging poised over the Ring.

Unity Ark closed, bristling with weapons. Thet’s image was clear. “It’s over, Rodi.”

Rodi took his hands from the controls. He felt very tired. “Okay, Thet. You’re right. It’s over. We’re both cut off from the Exaltation. We’re stranded here. Kill me if you like.”

Unity Ark exploded at him. Thet stared into his eyes.

Then she cried out, as if in pain.

The Ark veered sideways, avoiding Rodi, and disappeared into the mist at the heart of the Ring.

“Integrality calling Comms Officer.”

“This is the Comms Officer.”

“How are you?”

“I am not the one who spoke to you previously. My mother died in the recent convocation.”

“…I’m sorry.”

“Did we succeed?”

In simple terms, Rodi told the story.

“So, in the end, Thet spared you. Why?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps the futility of it all got through to her. Perhaps she realized that with all contact with the Exaltation lost her best chance of survival was to take the Ark away, try for a new beginning in some fresh Universe…” And perhaps some lingering human feeling had in the end triumphed over the programing.

“But now you are stranded, Rodi. You have lost your family.”

“…Yes.”

“You are welcome here. You could join my sexual grouping. The surgery required is superficial—”

Rodi laughed. “Thank you. But that’s well beyond my resources.”

“What, then?”

He remembered Darby’s wise kindness. If the Lunar colonists welcomed him, perhaps the loss of his family would grow less painful…

“We will remember you, and your Integrality.”

“Thank you, Comms Officer.”

Rodi turned the battered flitter and set course for the Moon.

Fragments of humanity. Relics of forgotten battles, aborted assaults…

Here was the most extravagant mission of all.

Once the system had been a spectacular binary pair, adorning some galaxy lost in the sky. Then one of the stars had suffered a supernova explosion, briefly and gloriously outshining its parent galaxy. The explosion had destroyed any planets, and damaged the companion star. After that, the remnant neutron star slowly cooled, glitching as it spun like some giant stirring in its sleep, while its companion star shed its life-blood hydrogen fuel over the neutron star’s wizened flesh. Slowly, a ring of companion-gas formed around the neutron star, and the system’s strange, spectral second system of planets coalesced.

Then human beings had come here.

The humans soared about the system, surveying. They settled on the largest planet in the smoke ring. They threw microscopic wormhole mouths into the cooling corpse of the neutron star, and down through the wormholes they poured devices and human-analogues, made robust enough to survive in the neutron star’s impossibly rigorous environment.

The devices and human-analogues had been tiny, like finely jeweled toys.

The human-analogues and their devices swarmed to a magnetic pole of the neutron star, and great machines were erected there: discontinuity drives, perhaps powered by the immense energy reserves of the neutron star itself.

Slowly at first, then with increasing acceleration, the neutron star — dragging its attendant companion, ring and planets with it — was forced out of its parent galaxy and thrown across space, a bullet of stellar mass fired at almost light speed.

“A bullet,” I said. “Yes. An apt term.”

A bullet directed at the heart of the Xeelee Project.

“But,” Eve said, “when the single, immense shot had been fired, little thought was given to those abandoned within the star, their usefulness over…"[6]

Hero

When Thea wore the Hero’s suit, Waving became extraordinary.

Breathless, she swept from the leafy fringe of the Crust forest and down, down through the Mantle’s vortex lines, until it seemed she could plunge deep into the bruised-purple heart of the Quantum Sea itself!

Was this how life had been, before the Core Wars? Oh, how she wished she had been born into the era of her grandparents — before the Wars — instead of these dreary, starving times.

She turned her face towards the South Pole, that place where all the vortex lines converged in a pink, misty infinity. She surged on through the Air, drowning her wistfulness and doubt in motion…

But there was something in the way.

Everyone had heard of the Hero, of course. The Hero myth was somehow more vivid to Thea than, say, the legends of the Ur-humans, who (it was said) had come from beyond the Star to build people to live here in the Mantle — and who then, after the Core Wars, had abandoned them. Perhaps it was because the Hero was of her own world, not of some misty, remote past.

Even as she grew older — and she came to understand how dull and without prospect her parents’ world really was — Thea longed for the Hero, in his suit of silver, to come floating up through the sky to take her away from the endless, drudging poverty of this life of hunting and scavenging at the fringe of the Crust forest.

But by the time she reached the age of fifteen she’d come to doubt that the Hero really existed: in the struggle to survive amid the endless debris of the Core Wars, the Hero was just too convenient a wish-fulfilling myth to be credible.

She certainly never expected to meet him.

“Thea! Thea!”

Snug inside her cocoon of woven spin-spider webbing, Thea kept her eyecups clamped closed. Her sister, Lur, was eighteen — three years older than Thea — and yet, Thea thought sourly, she still had the thin, grating tones of an adolescent. Just like a kid, especially when she was scared—

Scared.

The thought jolted Thea awake. She struggled to free her arms of the cocoon’s clinging webbing, and pushed her face out into the cool Air. She shook her head to clear clouded Air out of her sleep-rimmed eyecups.

Thea cast brisk, efficient glances around the treacherous sky. Lur was still calling her name. Danger was approaching, then. But from where?

Thea’s world was the Mantle of the Star, an immense cavern of yellow-white Air bounded above by the Crust and below by the Quantum Sea. The Crust itself was a rich, matted ceiling, purple-streaked with krypton grass and the graceful curves of tree trunks. Far below Thea, the Sea formed a floor to the world, mist-shrouded and indistinct. All around her, filling the Air between Crust and Sea, the vortex lines were an electric-blue cage. The lines filled space in a hexagonal array spaced about ten mansheights apart; they swept around the Star from the far upflux — the North — and arced past her like the trajectories of immense, graceful animals, converging at last into the soft red blur that was the South Pole, millions of mansheights away.

Thea’s people lived at the lower, leafy fringe of the Crust forest. Their cocoons were suspended from the trees’ outer branches, soft forms among the shiny, neutrino-opaque leaves; and as the humans emerged they looked — Thea thought with a contempt that surprised her — like bizarre animals: metamorphosing creatures of the forest, not human at all. But the cries of children, the frightened, angry shouts of adults, were far too human… The tribe’s small herd of Air-pigs, too, were squealing in unison, thrashing inside the loose net that bound them together, and staining the Air green with their jetfarts.

But where was the danger?

She held her fingers up before her face, trying to judge the spacing and pattern of the vortex lines. Were they drifting, becoming unstable?

Twice already in Thea’s short life, the Star had been struck by Glitches — starquakes. During a Glitch, the vortex lines would come sliding up through the Air, infinite and deadly, scything through the soft matter of the Crust forest — and humans, and their belongings — as if they were no more substantial than spoiled Air-pig meat…

But today the lines of quantized spin looked stable: only the regular cycles of bunching which humans used to count their time marred the lines’ stately progress.

Then what? A spin-spider, perhaps? But spiders lived in the open Air, building their webs across the vortex lines; they wouldn’t venture into the forest.

She saw Lur, now; her sister was trying to Wave towards her, obviously panicking, her limbs uncoordinated, thrashing at the Magfield. Lur was pointing past Thea, still shouting something—

There was a breath of Air at Thea’s back. A faint shadow.

She shifted her head to the right, feeling the lip of her cocoon scratch her bare skin.

A ray, no more than two mansheights away, slid softly towards her.

Thea froze. Rays were among the forest’s deadliest predators. She couldn’t possibly get out of the cocoon and away in time — her only hope was to stay still and pray that the ray didn’t notice she was here…

The ray was a translucent cloud a mansheight across. It was built around a thin, cylindrical spine, and six tiny, spherical eyes ringed the babyish maw set into its sketch of a face. The fins were six wide, thin sheets spaced evenly around the body; the fins rippled as the ray moved, electron gas sparkling around their leading edges. The flesh was almost transparent, and Thea could see shadowy fragments of some meal passing along the ray’s cylindrical gut.

The ray came within a mansheight of her. It slowed. She held her breath and willed her limbs into stillness.

I might live through this yet…

Then — with ghastly, heart-stopping slowness — the ray swiveled its hexagon of eyes towards her, unmistakably locking onto her face.

She closed her eyes. Perhaps if she didn’t struggle it would be quicker…

Then, he came.

There was a blue-white flash: a pillar of electron light that penetrated even her closed eyecups, and ripped through the encroaching silver-gray shadow of the ray.

She cried out. It was the first sound she had made since waking into this nightmare, she realized dully.

She opened her eyes. The ray had pulled away from her and was twisting in the air. The ray was being attacked, she saw, disbelieving: a bolt of electron light swept down through the Air and slanted into the ray’s misty structure, leaving the broad fins in crudely torn shreds. The ray emitted a high, thin keening; it tried to twist its head around to tear into this light-demon—

No, Thea saw now; this was no bolt of light, no demon: this was a man, a man who had wrapped his arms around the thin torso of the ray and was squeezing it, crushing the life out of the creature even as she watched.

She hung in her cocoon, even her fear dissolving in wonder. It was a man, true, but like no man she’d seen before. Instead of ropes and ponchos of Air-pig leather, this stranger wore an enclosing suit of some supple, silver-black substance that crackled with electron gas as he moved. Even his head was enclosed, with a clear plate before his face. There was a blade — a sword, of the same gleaming substance as the suit — tucked into his belt.

The ray stopped struggling. Fragments of half-digested leaf matter spewed from its gaping mouth, and its eyestalks folded in towards the center of its face.

The man pushed the corpse away from him. For a moment his shoulders seemed to hunch, as if he were weary; with gloved hands he brushed at his suit, dislodging shreds of ray flesh which clung there.

Thea stared, still in her cocoon, unable to take her eyes from his shimmering movements.

Now the man turned to Thea. With a single, feathery beat of his legs he Waved to her. The suit was of some black material inlaid with silvery whirls and threads. Apart from a large seam down the front of the chest, the suit was an unbroken whole, complete like an spin-spider eggshell. Behind the half-reflective helmet plate she could see a face — surprisingly thin, with two dark eyecups. When he spoke, his voice was harsh, but sounded as natural as if he were one of her own people.

“Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

Before Thea could answer Lur came Waving clumsily out of the sky, her small breasts shaking. Lur grabbed at Thea’s cocoon and clung to it, burying her face in Thea’s neck, sobbing.

Thea saw the stranger’s shadowed gaze slice over Lur’s body with analytical interest.

Thea encompassed Lur’s shoulders in her arms. She kept her eyes fixed on the man’s face. “Are you real? I mean — are you him? The Hero?”

Was it possible?

He looked at her and smiled obscurely, his face indistinct in the shadows of his suit.

She tried to analyze her feelings. As a child, when she’d envisaged this impossible moment — of the actual arrival of the Hero, from out of nowhere to help her — she’d always imagined a feeling of safety: that she would be able to immerse herself in the Hero’s massive, comforting presence.

But it wasn’t like that. With his face half-masked the Hero wasn’t comforting at all. In fact he seemed barely human, she realized.

Behind the translucent pane, the Hero’s eyes returned to Lur, calculating.

Her father wept.

Wesa’s thin, tired face, under its thatch of prematurely yellowed hair-tubes, was twisted with anguish. “I couldn’t reach you. I could see what was happening, but—”

Embarrassed, she submitted to his embrace. Wesa’s thin voice, with its words of self-justification, had less to do with her safety than with working out his own shock and shame, she realized.

As soon as she could, she got away from her father’s clinging grasp.

Her people were clustered around the Hero.

The Hero ran a gloved thumb down the seam set in the suit’s chest panel; the suit opened. He peeled it off whole, as if he were shedding a layer of skin. Under the suit he wore only gray undershorts, and his skin was quite sallow. He was much thinner than he’d seemed inside the suit, although his muscles were hard knots.

Thea felt repelled. Just a man, then. Is that all there is to it? And an old man, too, with yellowed hair-tubes and sunken, wrinkled face — older than anyone in her tribe, she realized.

He passed the suit to Wesa. Thea’s father took the ungainly thing and tied it carefully to a tree branch. Suspended there, its empty limbs dangling and its chest sunken and billowing, the suit looked still more grotesque and menacing — like a boned man, she thought.

Wesa — and Lur, and some of the others — clustered around the Hero again, bringing him food. Some of their prime food, too, the most recent of the Air-pig cuts.

The Hero crammed the food into his wizened mouth, grinning.

Later, the Hero donned his suit and went up into the forest, towards the root ceiling, alone. When he returned, he dragged a huge Air-pig after him.

The people — Lur and Wesa among them — clustered around again, patting at the fat Air-pig. The Air-pig’s body was a rough cylinder; now, in its terror, its six eyestalks were fully extended, and its huge, basking maw was pursed up closed. Futile jetfarts clouded the Air around it.

It would have taken a team of men and women days to have a chance of returning with such a catch.

Even through his faceplate Thea could see the Hero’s grin, as the people praised him.

She Waved away from the little encampment and perched in the thin outer branches of the forest. She snuggled against a branch, feeling the cold wood smooth against her skin, and nibbled at the young leaves which grew behind the wide, mature outer cups.

Then she curled into a ball against the branch, pushed more soft leaves into her mouth and tried to sleep.

A soft moan awoke her.

The smell of growing leaves was cloying in her nostrils. Blearily, she pushed her head out of the branches and into the Air.

There was motion far below her, silhouetted against the deep purple of the Quantum Sea. It was the Hero and her sister, Lur; they spiraled languidly around the vortex lines. The Hero wore his shining suit, but it was open to the waist. Lur had wrapped her legs around his hips. She arched away from him, her eyes closed. The Hero’s skin looked old, corrupted, against Lur’s flesh.

Payment for the hunter…

Thea ducked back into the forest and crammed her fists to her eyecups.

When she woke again, she felt depressed, listless.

She dropped out of the forest. She hovered in the Air, her knees tucked against her chest. With four or five brisk pushes she emptied her bowels. She watched the pale, odorless pellets of shit sail sparkling into the Air. Dense with neutrons, the waste would merge with the unbreathable underMantle and, perhaps, sink at last into the Quantum Sea.

The Hero was sleeping, tucked into a cocoon — her father’s cocoon, she realized with disgust. The empty suit was suspended from its branch. There seemed to be nobody about; most of the tribe were at the Air-pigs’ net, evidently preparing one of the animals for slaughter.

Suddenly she felt awake — alive, excited; capillaries opened across her face, tingling with superfluid Air. Silently, trying to hold her breath, she pushed herself away from her eyrie and Waved to the suit.

Its empty fingers and legs dangled before her, grisly but fascinating. She reached out a trembling hand. The fabric was finely worked, and the inlaid silver threads were smooth and cold.

The front of the suit gaped open. She pushed her hand inside; she found a soft, downy material that felt cool and comfortable…

It would be the work of a moment to slip her own legs into these black-silver leggings.

The Hero groaned, his lips parting softly; he turned slightly in her father’s cocoon.

He was still asleep. Perhaps, Thea thought with disgust, he was dreaming of her sister.

She had to do this now.

Briskly, but with trembling fingers, she untied the suit from its branch. She twisted in the Air, tucked her knees to her chest and dropped her legs into the opened-up suit.

The lining sighed over her skin, embracing her flesh. She wriggled her arms into the sleeves. The feeling of the gloves around each finger was extraordinary; she stared at her hands, seeing how the tubes of fabric — too long for her own fingers — drooped slightly over her fingertips.

She pulled closed the chest panel and, as she’d seen the Hero do, ran her gloved thumb along the seam. It sealed smoothly. She reached back over her shoulders and pulled the helmet forward, letting it drop over her head. Again a simple swipe of the thumb was sufficient to seal the helmet against the rest of the suit.

The suit was too big for her; the lower rim of the faceplate was a dark line across her vision, cutting off half the world, and she could feel folds of loose material against her back and chest. But it encased her, just as it had the Hero, and — when she raised her arms — it moved as she moved.

Cautiously, experimentally, she tried to Wave. She arched her back and flexed her legs.

Electron gas crackled explosively around her limbs. She squirted clumsily across the tree-scape, branches and leaves battering at her skin.

She grabbed at the trees with her gloved hands, dragging herself to a halt.

She looked down at the suit, trembling afresh. It was as if the Magfield had picked her up and hurled her through the Air.

Such power.

She pushed down from the trees and out into the clear Air. She tried again — but much more cautiously this time, with barely a flex of her legs. She jolted upwards through a few mansheights: still jarringly quickly, but this time under reasonable control.

She Waved again, moving in an awkward circle.

It ought to be simple enough to master, she told herself. After all, she was just Waving, as she had done from the moment she’d popped from her mother’s womb. Waving meant dragging limbs — which were electrically charged — across the Magfield. The Star’s powerful magnetic field induced electric currents in the limbs, which in turn pushed back at the Magfield.

Some part of this suit — perhaps the silver-gleaming inlays — must be a much better conductor than human flesh and bone. And so the Magfield’s push was so much greater. It was just a question of getting the feel of it.

She leaned back against the Magfield and thrust gently with her legs. Gradually she learned to build up the tempo of this assisted Waving, and wisps of electron gas curled about her thighs. The secret was not strength, really, but gentleness, suppleness, a sensitivity to the soft resistance of the Magfield.

The suit carried her gracefully, effortlessly, across the flux lines.

She sailed across the sky. The suit felt natural about her body, as if it had always been there — and she suspected that a small, inner part of her would always cling to the memory of this experience, utterly addicted…

The Hero’s face ballooned up before her. She cried out. He grinned through the faceplate at her, the age-lines around his eyecups deep and shadowed. He grabbed her shoulders; she could feel his bony fingers dig into her flesh through the suit fabric.

“I came up under you,” he said, his voice harsh. “I knew you couldn’t see me. That damn helmet must be cutting off half your field of view.”

Fright passed, and anger came to her. She raised her gloved hands and knocked his forearms away.

…Easily. He suppressed a cry and clutched his arms to his chest; rapidly he straightened up to face her, but not before she had seen the pain in his eyecups.

She reached out and grabbed the Hero’s shoulders, as he’d held hers. In this suit, not only could she Wave like a god — she was strong, stronger than she had ever imagined. She let her fingers dig into his bone. Laughing, she raised him above her head. He seemed to be trying to keep his face empty of expression; she saw little fear there, but there was something else: a disquiet.

“Who’s the Hero now?” she spat.

“A suit of Corestuff doesn’t make a hero.”

“No,” she said, thinking of Lur. “And heroes don’t need to be paid…”

He grinned, mocking her.

She thought over what he’d said. “What’s Corestuff?”

“Let me go and I’ll tell you.”

She hesitated.

He snapped, “Let me go, damn you. What do you think I can do to you?”

Cautiously she let go of his shoulders and pushed him away from her.

He rubbed at the bulging bones of his shoulders. “You may as well understand what you’re stealing. Corestuff. The inlay in the fabric; a superconducting thread mined from within the Quantum Sea.” He sniffed. “From the old days, before the Core Wars, of course.”

“Did the suit belong to an Ur-human?”

He laughed sourly. “Ur-humans couldn’t survive here inside the Mantle. Even a savage child should know that.”

She looked carefully at his yellowed hair-tubes, unwilling to betray more ignorance. How old was he? “Do you remember the old days — before the Core Wars? Is that how you got the suit?”

He looked at her with contempt — but, he saw, a contempt softened with pity. Am I really such a savage? she wondered.

“Kid, the Wars were over before I was born. All the technology — the cities, the wormhole paths across the Mantle — all of it had gone. There were just a few scraps left — like this suit, which my father salvaged.” He grinned again, his face splitting like a skull. “It used to belong to police, in one of the great cities. Police. Do you know what that means?

“The suit kept us alive — my parents and me — for a while. Then, after they were dead—”

She tried to fill her voice with contempt. “You used it to fly around the Mantle being the Hero.”

He looked angry. “Is that so terrible? At least I help people. What will you do with it, little girl?”

She reached out for him, turning her hands into claws. In a moment, she could crush the life out of his bony neck—

He returned her stare calmly, unflinching.

She tipped backwards and Waved away from him.

Thea surged along infinite corridors of vortex lines. Floating spin-spider eggs padded at her faceplate and legs. The Quantum Sea was a purple floor far below her, delimiting the yellow Air; the Crust was a complex, inverted landscape beneath which she soared.

Waving was glorious. She stared down at her silver-coated body; blue highlights from the corridors of vortex lines and the soft purple glow of the Sea cast complex shadows across her chest. Already she was moving faster than she’d ever moved in her life, and she knew she was far from exhausting the possibilities of this magical suit.

She opened her mouth and yelled, her own voice loud inside the helmet.

She flew, spiraling, around the arcing vortex lines, her suited limbs crackling with blue electron gas; breathless, she swept from the leafy fringe of the Crust forest and down, down through the Mantle, until it seemed as if she could plunge deep into the bruised-purple heart of the Quantum Sea itself.

She turned her face towards the South Pole, that place where all the vortex lines converged. She surged on through the Air, drowning her doubts — and the image of the Hero’s disquieted face — in motion.

…But there was something in her path.

Spin-web.

The web was fixed to the vortex line array by small, tight rings of webbing which encircled, without quite touching, the glowing spin-singularities. The web’s threads were almost invisible individually, but the dense mats caught the yellow and purple glow of the Mantle, so that lines of light formed a complex tapestry.

It was really very beautiful, Thea thought abstractedly. But it was a wall across the sky.

The spin-spider itself was a dark mass in the upper corner of her vision. She wondered if it had already started moving towards the point where she would impact the net — or if it would wait until she was embedded in its sticky threads. The spider looked like an expanded, splayed-open version of an Air-pig. Each of its six legs was a mansheight long, and its open maw would be wide enough to enfold her torso.

Even the suit wouldn’t protect her.

She swiveled her hips and beat at the Magfield with her legs, trying to shed her velocity. But she’d been going as rapidly as she could; she wouldn’t be able to stop in time. She looked quickly around the sky. Perhaps she could divert rather than stop, fly safely around the trap. But she couldn’t even see the edges of the web: spin-spider webs could be hundreds of mansheights across.

The web exploded out of the sky. She could see thick knots at the intersection of the threads, the glistening stickiness of the lines themselves.

She curled into a ball and tucked her suited arms over her head.

How could she have been so stupid as to fall into such a trap? Lur and Wesa, even through their tears, would think her a fool, when they heard. She imagined her father’s voice: “Always look up- and downflux. Always. If you scare an Air-piglet, which way does it move? Along the flux paths, because it can move quickest that way. And that’s why predators set their traps across the flux paths, waiting for anything stupid enough to fly straight into an open mouth…”

She wondered how long the spin-spider would take to clamber down to her. Would she still be conscious when it peeled open her Hero’s suit as if unwrapping a leaf, and began its work on her body?

…A mass came hurtling from her peripheral vision, her left, towards the web. She flinched and looked up. Had the spider left its web and come for her already?

But it was the Hero. Somehow he’d chased her, kept track of her clumsy arrowing through the sky — and all without her realizing it, she thought ruefully. He carried his sword, his shining blade of Corestuff, in his bony hand.

…But he was too late; already the first strands of webbing were clutching at her suit, slowing her savagely.

In no more than a few heartbeats she came to rest, deep inside the web. Threads descended before her face and laid themselves across her shoulders, arms and face. She tried to move, but the webbing merely tightened around her limbs. It shimmered silver and purple all around her, a complex, three-dimensional mesh of light.

The web shuddered, rattling her body inside its gleaming suit. The spin-spider was approaching her, coming for its prize…

“Thea! Thea!”

She tried to turn her head; thread clutched at her neck. The Hero was swinging his sword, hacking into the web. His muscles were knots under his leathery skin. Thea could see dangling threads brushing against the Hero’s bare arms and shoulders, one by one growing taut and then slackening as he moved on, burrowing into the layers of web.

He was cutting through the web towards her.

“Open the suit! It’s caught, but you aren’t. Come on, girl—”

She managed to raise a trembling hand to her chest. It was awkward finding the seam, with the web constantly clutching at her; but at last the suit peeled open. The soft, warm stink of spin-spider web spilled into the opened suit.

She pushed away the helmet and drew her legs out of the suit.

The Hero, his crude web-tunnel already closing behind him, held out his hand. “Come on, Thea; take hold—”

She glanced back. “But the suit—” The ancient costume looked almost pathetic, empty of life and swathed in spider-webbing.

“Forget the damn suit. There isn’t time. Come on—”

She reached out and took his hand; his palm was warm and hard. With a grunt he leaned backward and hauled her from the web; the last sticky threads clutched at her legs, stinging. When they were both clear she fell against him; breathing hard, capillaries dilated all over his thin face, the Hero wrapped his arms around her.

The tunnel in the web had already closed: all that remained of it was a dark, cylindrical path through the layers of webbing.

And, as she watched, the spin-spider’s huge head closed over the shining suit.

“I always seem to be rescuing you, don’t I?” the Hero said dryly.

“You could have saved the suit.”

He looked defensive. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

“You didn’t even try. Why not?”

He brushed his stiff, yellowed hair out of his eyes. He appeared old and tired. “I think I decided that the world had seen enough of that suit — enough of the Hero, in fact.”

She frowned. “That’s stupid.”

“Is it?” He brought his face close to hers. His voice hard, he said, “It was that moment when I woke to find you inside the suit. I looked through that plate and into your eyecups, Thea, and I didn’t like what I saw.”

She remembered: In a moment, she could crush the life out of his bony neck —

“I saw myself, Thea.”

She shivered suddenly, unwilling to think through the implications of his words.

“What will you do now?”

He shrugged thin shoulders. “I don’t know.” He looked at her cautiously. “I could stay with you people for a while. I’m not a bad hunter, even without the suit.”

She frowned.

He scratched at one eyecup. “On the other hand…”

“What?”

He pointed to the south. “I hear the Parz tribe at the Pole are trying to build a city again.”

Despite herself, she felt stirred — excited. “Like before the Core Wars?”

He looked wistful. “No. No, we’ll never recapture those days. But still, it would be a great project to work on.” He studied her appraisingly. “I hear the new city will be twenty thousand mansheights, from side to side. Think of that. And that’s not counting the Corestuff mine they’re going to build from the base.” He smiled, wrinkles gathering beneath his eyecups.

Thea stared into the south — into the far downflux, to the place where all the vortex lines converged.

Slowly, they began to Wave back to the Crust forest.

The Hero said, “Even the Ur-humans would have been impressed by twenty thousand mansheights, I’ll bet. Why, that’s almost an inch…”

The goals and purpose of the great wars were lost; but still humans fought on, enraged insects battering against the glass-walled lamps of the Xeelee constructs.

The Xeelee, unimpeded, appeared at last to take pity. Humanity was — put aside.

But humanity had been a mere distraction. All the while, the Xeelee confronted a much more dangerous enemy.