Vacuum Diagrams

…Is it over? Is humanity destroyed? Lethe, Eve, we’ve covered millions of years. We’ve seen the flight of the Xeelee, the victory of those photino birds. It must be over. What can be left to show me?”

“Watch,” she said patiently. “Watch…”

Shell

“I’ve found a bird from the Shell — a bird from space!” Allel ran into the village bursting with her news, her baggy bark shirt flapping.

But nobody was impressed. She couldn’t understand it. Younger children turned back to their games in the dust.

Her mother, Boyd, absently cuffed Allel’s fourteen-year-old head. “Don’t bother me,” she growled, and went about her business.

Boyd’s face was a scarred, complex mask as she moved amongst the groups of men and women, massive and formidable in her coat of quilted cow-tree bark, planning and talking urgently. It was already late afternoon; that evening Boyd would be leading this ragged army south in another assault on the defense of the Bridge.

Allel knew how important this was to her mother; eventually they had to secure a crossing over the river Atad and gain access to the south — otherwise the northern glaciers would surely crush their tiny village before many more winters. Boyd’s fists were clenched white as she argued. Allel knew she was brooding over the prospect of another bloody failure, and decided to keep out of her way.

She found her grandfather, Lantil, ferrying bowls of excrement and other waste from the bark teepees to the clusters of cow-trees at the heart of the village. Lantil dumped out the bowls into the trees’ root systems and tiredly tolerated his granddaughter’s chatter.

She told him how she’d gone out of the village alone and scrambled over the rocky shoulders of Hafen’s Hill, a mile or so away. At the summit she’d thrown herself flat, panting, and stared up in wonder: in the afternoon light the Shell was a glowing quilt, and she’d soon forgotten the wind from the northern ice fields that probed at the crude seams of her shirt…

Allel’s was a world without a sky. Instead the Shell swept from horizon to horizon, covering the land like a glowing lid of blue, green and startling orange. She’d traced the familiar lines of the ocean boundaries and watched clouds wind themselves into an upside-down storm directly above her. She reached up a finger as if to stir the storm on that great plate hanging over her—

— and the bird had tumbled out of the air. She’d scuttled to her knees and cupped the bird in her hands; its heart rattled as ice droplets melted from its wings.

The bird was an ice blue, a spectacular color she’d never seen before. And in its beak was a vivid orange flower.

The precise color of those strange orange splashes on the Shell.

The bird recovered and clattered away, but that didn’t matter. Allel knew it must have lost its way and crossed the Gap between the worlds.

She’d run off down the heathered slopes to her home.

She dogged Lantil’s footsteps as he trudged wearily among the teepees. “But if the world and the Shell are globes, what holds them apart?” Perhaps there were great pillars beyond the horizon…

Lantil pushed a lank of dirty hair back from his brow. “What does it matter?”

“I want to know,” she stamped.

Her grandfather sighed. “All right.” He knelt beside Allel and made a gnarled fist. “There’s the world, Home, round like a ball.” He cupped his other hand around the fist. “And there’s the Shell, a hollow sphere around Home.” Now he broke the fist and twirled a fingertip in a helix inside the cupped hand. “The Sun moves through the Gap, giving us day and night, summer and winter.”

Allel nodded impatiently. “I know all that. But who built it all?”

“People, of course.” He straightened up, massaging his back. “To keep out monsters called the Xeelee.”

Allel, wide-eyed, imagined giants stalking beyond the Shell, beating their fists against ocean bottoms and tree roots.

“Now I’ve got to get on,” Lantil snapped. “Get on with you, child. Get on…” Grumbling, he went back to his chores.

Allel ran off, savoring her newest fragment of knowledge. She imagined flying up to a saucer-shaped land where a world hung in the sky, a ball plastered with rocks and trees.

The next morning she rose at dawn. She pushed her way out of the teepee’s bark flap, letting the gray cold scour out her night fug. She shivered her way to a cow-tree and sucked icy milk from one of its nipples.

The village was hushed in the continued absence of the warriors. A group of old folk and children were at work already, making the most of the precious summer day; they were peeling a fresh sheet of clothlike bark, barely formed, from one of the cow trees. Allel peered furtively up at the Shell. The morning terminator was a gray bar that straddled the horizons, scouring eastward. The night lands beyond were broken by flickering sparks: fires that showed that people lived on the Shell, like flies on that great ceiling.

She’d brought a small bark satchel from the teepee; now she arranged it over her shoulder and scurried over the rough track to Hafen’s Hill. From the summit she could see the Atad river, a glistening track to the south; the Bridge looked like an indestructible toy, one of the few of the old structures not yet swallowed by the ice. Smoke blurred the scene. She wondered if that was a good sign.

She soon forgot the distant battle as she got to work. She opened her satchel and drew out a small lamp, a gourd filled with alcohol fermented from cow-tree fruit. She cut a length of wick with the big stone knife her grandfather had made for her. She held a flint to the wick; it curled and popped as black smoke seeped into the crisp air. Now she opened out a small bag, a rough globe. She held its narrow neck over the flame, and soon her fingers were coated with lamp-black—

— and the simple balloon filled up and lurched a few feet into the air. Then it turned belly-up and flopped to the ground. Allel bared her teeth at the Shell as if she owned it already; her heart beat as had that lost bird’s. Now then, a little more weight around the mouth…

A sandal stamped down, crushing the balloon. The bark of the sandal was crusted with blood and dust.

“Get up.” Boyd spat the words; blood leaked from a new wound over her eyes.

Allel stood, furious. Her anger collided with her mother’s contempt. Save for the scars of battle, the years had been easy on Boyd. Mother and daughter faced each other like twins, images in a dark mirror.

“Our attack on the Bridge failed,” Boyd ground out. “Those bastards holding it want to keep the whole bloody south to themselves. Good people died. And you — you won’t even help the old folk with their chores. What do you think you’re doing?”

Allel picked up the sputtering lamp. “I doubt if you’d understand,” she said haughtily.

Boyd slapped the lamp from her hands. It smashed against a rock; alcohol pooled and puffed into flame. “You waste your time on rubbish. Don’t dare to speak to me like that.”

Allel bit back her rage. “I fill the bag with smoke. It flies. Build one big enough and I could fly with it—”

“More rubbish.” Boyd hawked and spat out a ball of bloodstained phlegm; it sizzled in the alcohol fire. “If it’s ever left up to you, we’ll all die of rubbish.” She grabbed a handful of Allel’s tunic; her breath was sour. “Or I’ll kill you first. And that’s not rubbish.” She strode off down the Hill’s broken flank. “Come on. You’ll be grown soon. It’s time I put a stop to your questions.”

Allel didn’t move. “Where are we going?”

“North. To the place where our people once lived, before the cold drove them out. North to the City.”

“Why should I come?”

Without looking back, Boyd said simply: “Because if you don’t I’ll break your rubbish neck.”

Allel looked back ruefully at her home, where the fires of the recent night were still burning. Then she clutched her crumpled shirt closed against the wind and followed her mother.

The breeze lifted the abandoned balloon; its final flight ended in the ruins of the lamp, where it began to burn fitfully.

The Sun wove its helical web around the world.

When night fell Boyd and Allel sheltered beneath a wild cow-tree. In silence, they drank from its milk nipples and broiled slices of meat fruit over a small fire. Boyd slept sternly beneath her quilted coat. Allel shivered in her thin garments, and burrowed into a nest of leaves. She peered up sourly at the Shell’s seamless dark, picking out clustered fires.

In the morning she stuffed leaves inside her clothes and fashioned herself a rough cap of cow-tree bark.

After some days of this the frost grew more persistent, until their feet crunched over thin ice. Light snow fell. They passed a few abandoned settlements; even the hardy cow-trees grew sparse here.

A blizzard closed around them like a white mouth. They staggered up to the milkless corpse of a cow-tree. Allel stared at the shrunken nipples and withered fruit. Boyd laughed at her, her eyelids sprinkled with snowflakes. “Comes as a shock, doesn’t it? A dead cow-tree. We were given a world filled with beautiful buildings, and cow-trees to feed and clothe us like mothers. A home safe from the Xeelee.

“But the world’s old and falling apart. The Sun seems to be failing. Ice has covered the cities and frozen the milk in the cow-trees. We trudge through the snow.” She began digging into the snow packed against the dry wood. “Come on. We’ll let this lot blow itself out. The snow will keep you warm.”

As she worked, Allel considered a changeless life of endless summer. What would there be to do all day? Her bare fingers grew numb.

When the storm blew over they continued the journey. With the Shell like a map over them it was impossible to get lost, and at last they came to the lip of a great natural bowl. Snow pooled around the low buildings of the City, which were sprinkled in two matching crescents.

Allel, used to crude teepees of cow-tree bark, touched walls that were as smooth as skin. But the interiors were cold and jumbled, and snow drifted waist-deep in the avenues.

Lifting heavy legs out of the snow, they forced their way to the common center of the City’s twin crescents. Here was a small cylindrical building, no more than three paces across. Allel helped her mother scrape snow from the door. Boyd blew on damp fingers. “Go ahead,” she said slyly. “You first.” Allel pushed through the light door—

— and stared in astonishment at the far wall of the chamber, at least a hundred paces away. She stumbled backwards and landed in the snow, which soaked into her thin trousers. Boyd laughed, not unkindly, and hauled her to her feet. “A vast hall crumpled into a tiny hut. The people who built this had powers even you never imagined, eh?”

Allel stumbled around the tiny building. Where was all that space stored? If not sideways — or behind — or up, or down — what fourth direction was there? The puzzle settled behind her eyes like a spider.

The floor area was empty, but the paper-thin walls were covered with pictures, still lit and animated after uncounted generations. “The pictures tell our story,” Boyd said gruffly. “How we rose and fell.” She stamped snow from her sandals and led the way around the walls. Afterwards Allel thought they could have walked in the opposite direction and lost little of the sense, for the story of humankind had a symmetrical design.

The bright side of the symmetry was expansion. From a world without a Shell, tiny ships like streamlined fish swam out on hyperdrive to the stars…

“What was ‘hyperdrive’? And ‘stars’?”

They were just words, Boyd said, passed on by other mothers on other days. Allel wondered if her balloon had risen on hyperdrive. She looked closely at the ships but could see no sign of burners. She tried to touch the picture—

— and her hand passed into the depthless wall, in a direction she could not identify. She fingered a model ship; it was like a nut drawn on an invisible string. More mysteries…

At its peak humanity was a master of many stars — which were evidently places very far away. And then—

“And then we met the Xeelee,” said Boyd, and they inspected a harrowing battle scene. Elusive fingers snatched at the little ships. “Whoever they were, they were too big for us.”

After the Xeelee wars came the dark obverse of humanity’s conquest of the stars: its sad subsidence back to its home world, prodded by the dark fingers of the Xeelee.

They came to the last two panels. Boyd said: “Finally we returned to our home and rebuilt it as a place safe from the Xeelee.” The first panel showed a sphere, blue capped with fat brown poles. Painted onto the central cerulean band were clouds and a tiny Sun that twinkled along the equator. The fringes of the polar caps held a lot of detail: sideways-on pictures of trees and men, oriented as if the clouds were “up” and the poles were “down.” “I don’t understand this one,” Boyd admitted. “Maybe it was a stage in the Shell’s construction. But here’s the world as it is now.” The last image was crudely sketched on the surface of the wall, with no depth or animation. It showed a globe with a Shell around it. Allel picked at flaking paint. Boyd coughed self-consciously. “So, you understand now why I brought you here?”

Allel inspected paint dust. “This is just dyed cow-tree milk. This last picture must have been added much later—”

Boyd swore. She spat on the smooth floor and stalked out.

…And, thought Allel, excited, in that case maybe the world was more like the other image, the blue sphere. But what did it mean? Everyone knew there was a Shell around the world — you could see it…

She became aware of her mother’s absence. Cursing, she hurried out.

Boyd stood a few paces from the door, fists clenched. Feathers of snow drifted around her legs. “I repeat. Why do you think I brought you here?”

Allel tried to concentrate on the question. “To show me this place? To tell me its story?”

“Yes!” The trackless snow softened Boyd’s shout. “Once we rebuilt the whole world, but now we can’t even melt a few glaciers.” She gripped her daughter’s shoulders, not roughly. “People got soft and forgot. Allel — if I fail, you’ve got to carry on. Perhaps it will fall to you to take over, and lead our people to the Bridge. That’s the truth of our world, the only truth. The only way to save ourselves that’s within our power.”

Allel returned her mother’s fierce stare. “I understand, but…”

Boyd sneered: “But you want to ask the Shell dwellers what it’s like living in a saucer.” Her eyes were flat, impervious to the hard cold. Allel wondered how she and her mother had grown so far apart, becoming as symmetrical as opposing poles. The one pragmatic, the other — a visionary? — or a fool? Who was right? Perhaps that was a question without an answer—

She knew Boyd was trying to force her to grow up. But the Shell arced over them like a roof coated with its own ice. Could she give up all her dreams and become a creature of her mother?

“Listen,” she said desperately. “I’ve thought of a way we can take the Bridge.”

Her mother whirled and drove her palm against Allel’s cheek. Blood pumped into Allel’s mouth and strange scents flooded her head.

“You’ve learned nothing,” Boyd said hoarsely. “I’d rather leave you here.” She forced herself forward, fists clenched white.

Allel mumbled: “I mean it.” She felt blood freezing on her lip. She became aware she’d lost her cap. But Boyd was hesitating.

“How?”

“If I succeed…” She coughed and spat blood. It was vivid against the snow. “If I succeed, will you help me build a hyperdrive machine to fly to the Shell?”

Boyd’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t believe it. You’re bargaining with me…” Then she dug a bark handkerchief out of a voluminous pocket. “Here. Clean yourself up.”

The dozen warriors converged on the Bridge. They wielded branches hacked from cow-trees, their miraculous meat buds smashed away. To Allel, watching from above, the crude clubs were symbols of the depressing symmetry of humanity’s rise and fall.

The Bridge was a gleaming parabola plastered with teepees. From the teepees defending warriors emerged, grubby and yelling, brandishing rocks and clubs. Blood splashed over the seamless carriageway. But soon it was hard to separate the two sides, but Allel could see that as before the attackers were being driven away.

The breeze picked up and the great balloon over her creaked into motion, its stitched bark straining. The canvas sling chafed her armpits, and she tended the alcohol burners clustered like berries just above her head. The balloon wallowed in the air. Soon its load would be lighter, she thought, uncertain of her feelings.

Her shadow drifted over the melee, touching fighters, men and women alike, who wriggled together like blood-soaked termites. They looked up in fear or anticipation. She took a small alcohol lamp, one of a cluster tied to her belt. She lit the lamp, cut its cord with her stone knife, and dropped the lamp delicately into the defenders’ muddled line. The lamp flared into flame; a toy man ran screaming, his shirt a torch. Another lamp, and another. Cries of anger sailed up at her, followed by whirling clubs. No weapons could reach her, and she dropped her lamps. Then the defenders’ line broke and the battle surged across the Bridge. Teepees crumpled, and old folk screamed. Allel thought she heard her mother shout in triumph.

Her lamps gone, Allel dropped the pouch and the balloon rose further. She stared up at the Shell’s complex tapestry and waited for a breeze to take her home.

She found the teepee’s air filled with her mother’s sweat and dirt. Boyd’s left wrist was a stump of torn blood vessels and shattered bone. It had been cauterized; now Lantil bathed it with milk and tears. Boyd took Allel’s forearm in a grip that pulsed with pain. “Daughter! Your damn bag of smoke worked…”

Allel tugged gently, wanting only to be released. “Yes. And now you’ll have to help me build a real machine to cross the Gap.”

Lantil pushed at Allel’s chest, his liver-spotted hand fluttering like a bird. “You should be ashamed to speak to her that way. Can’t you see she’s hurt?”

But Allel kept her gaze locked with her mother’s.

Slowly Boyd grinned. “Won’t give up, will you? Determined to prove me wrong. All right. On one condition.”

“What?”

“Take me, too. I’ve done my job here; maybe I want to see the Shell people, too… ah…”

The pain silenced her. Lantil pulled his daughter’s blood-spattered head against his chest.

Allel loosened her mother’s grasp, and went to her pallet to start her plans. She lay with her face to the bark wall.

The whole village turned out for the launch. They nudged each other and pointed out panels on the balloon which they themselves had helped stitch, forgetting Boyd’s five years of bullying.

Impeded by their harnesses, Boyd and Allel labored at the bellows-like fuel pumps. The great bark envelope filled slowly, throwing swollen shadows in the flat morning light. Allel eyed the low Sun warily. They’d timed their flight to avoid a collision — fantastic though such a prospect seemed. But, she had reasoned doggedly, the Shell was behind the Sun. They were going to fly to the Shell. Therefore they could hit the Sun, and had to navigate to avoid it.

Her harness twitched twice, as if coming awake — and then, with a surprising surge, lifted her. The ground tilted away. People gave a ragged cheer and children chased the balloon’s shadow. Boyd roared and waved her good hand at them. Her crippled arm was lashed to the rigging. “We’re off, daughter!” she bellowed.

The landscape opened out and swallowed up the huddled villagers. To the north the Atad river curved into view, and beyond the site of their old home Allel could see the glaciers prowling the horizon.

She felt she was floating into a great silent box. The balloon’s throat occluded the Shell’s upside-down clouds. She hoisted herself into the rigging to tend the burners, prizing the stubby wicks from the resin-soaked barrels of alcohol. Gritty sweat soaked her eyes. She’d insisted they both wear quilted coats despite Boyd’s protests; she remembered the frozen ice-blue bird she’d found on Hafen’s Hill on another summer day, five years ago.

And sure enough, not many minutes later the dampness at her neck chilled and dried. Her breath caught and soon grew labored. “Even the damn air has a Gap here,” growled Boyd. “But you know, this harness isn’t chafing so much as it did.”

Allel, too, felt oddly light; she had a sensation of falling. But they rose smoothly into blue silence. Soon they were miles up; clouds dissolved as they passed into them. Their world collapsed to a Shell-like map, shutting them out; above and below became symmetrical and Allel’s stomach lurched.

Their rate of ascent slowed. The breeze in the rigging grew softer. The craft lumbered, unstable.

“What now?” demanded Boyd uneasily. “Watch the burners.”

“Yes. I wonder if — ah. The burners! Quick!”

The balloon was collapsing.

They worked grimly, dragging themselves into the rigging and cutting away the burning wicks. The envelope crumpled over the doused lamps.

And Boyd was upside down.

Or Allel was.

Her harness was slack. The components of their balloon drifted in a jumble. Boyd thrashed in the air as if drowning — but there was no up to kick towards. Fear showed beneath her pale scars.

But Allel understood.

“It’s the middle of the Gap!” Allel yelled, exhilarated by her mother’s discomfiture. “The Shell dwellers live upside down. Up for us is down for them. Did we think we’d fly up and bump against the Shell like a ceiling? This is the place where up and down cross over!” Warm air spilled from the balloon and brushed her face. Ground and Shell were enormous parallel plates that careened identically around her. She laughed and swooped.

But their equilibrium in the weightless zone was unstable, and soon invisible fingers clutched at them. Wind whistled in the tangled rigging and their harness grew taut again. “We’re falling back!” Allel cried in disappointment. Boyd struggled to keep her good arm free.

Now air resistance roughly righted them. The balloon opened out like a parachute but scarcely slowed their fall.

Boyd roared above the wind: “We’ve got to light the burners!”

They hunted for flints and cupped their hands around the wicks to keep out the snatching breeze. Heat roared up. Boyd thrust at the fuel pumps while Allel scrambled precariously into the tangled rigging to drag at the neck of the envelope, trying to trap all the warmed air.

Their descent slowed a little. Allel’s arms ached and her hair whipped at her forehead. The ground exploded into unwelcome details, rivers and hills and trees and pebbles—

She rolled on impossibly hard earth, grass blades clutching at her face. Her blood was loud in her ears. The balloon folded as if wounded.

In a sunlit meadow, mother and daughter lay amid the ruins of their bark spaceship.

Sunlight scoured her eyes. Allel sat up, blinking, pushing at the knotted remains of her harness. She was surrounded by cool grass and flowers; a brook led to a stand of cow-trees and the horizon was made up of heather-coated hills.

And, as it had always done, the Shell curved over it all like a great blue tent.

Boyd slept peacefully in a tatter of the balloon. Allel hesitated for some minutes, vaguely fearful of her mother’s reaction. Then she found a remnant of a shattered burner and woke her mother with a cup of brook water. Boyd sat up clumsily, favoring her bad arm.

“We failed,” Allel said.

“Huh?”

Allel pointed at the Shell above them. “Look. We must have fallen back. If we’d reached the Shell we’d see the world up there, a ball of rock, cupped by the Shell. And the land would tilt up at the horizon…”

Boyd grunted. Sensitive to her daughter’s mood, she drank in silence. She probed at her limbs. “At least we’re still whole,” she rumbled. She looked about. Then — unexpectedly — she grinned. “So we failed, did we? Eh?”

She dug her good hand into the ground, and then shook it in Allel’s face. “Look at that! Look!”

At the heart of the clump was a bright orange flower. A Shell flower.

Allel’s thoughts swam like fish. “Now I really don’t understand…”

“We made it. We’re on the Shell! That’s enough for me.” Then Boyd followed her daughter’s gaze upwards, to the roof over the world. Her eyes narrowed.

Allel said slowly, “Above us we see Home, not the Shell. Yet it looks as the Shell does. The two worlds are complete in themselves, yet they are — wrapped around each other. Symmetry. You see the same thing — a Shell — from whichever world you’re on.”

Boyd nodded shrewdly. “Well, that much I understand. Like us, eh? Two halves of the same whole. No weak center, no protecting Shell. Just the two of us.”

Allel dropped her eyes, hotly embarrassed. She went on doggedly: “But how? If we’re on the Shell, why doesn’t the land curve up like a saucer? Why don’t we see Home floating up there like a ball? How can it look like another Shell?”

Boyd made a little growling noise, and flung the shard of burner into the grass. A small flock of ice-blue birds clattered off, alarmed. “Well, you’re the dreamer. Dream up an answer.”

Allel lay flat. She rested her head on very ordinary loam and stared up through two layers of clouds. She thought of two worlds, each a ball yet each cupping the other like a shell round a nut. How could that be?

Her vision of her universe was crumbling, like the flaking planet-in-a-box milk painting on that museum wall. She imagined reaching into the box to the truth—

Boyd said gruffly: “Well, what now?”

Allel gestured vaguely. “Fix the balloon and get home. We’ve got to make people understand. Build more balloons and go to the old Cities. Find a way to turn back the glaciers, or fix the Sun…”

Boyd was staring past her shoulder. Allel turned — then sat up quickly.

The boy stood at the edge of the stand of cow-trees. He was no better dressed than they were; teeth flashed in a dark face as he jabbered at them, smiling and pointing and cupping his hands.

Allel watched, baffled. “What’s he saying?”

Boyd bellowed with laughter. “I think he’s asking what it’s like living in a saucer.”

Boyd stood up and, with some dignity, straightened the shreds of her quilted jacket. Allel got to her feet, stiffly. “Come on,” said Boyd. “Let’s see if his people can cook as well as your grandfather.”

They walked towards the boy across the meadow of bright orange flowers.

“Lethe. I can’t believe they fell so far. They’ve become utterly dependent on that artificial biosphere. They’re reduced to technologies of stone and wood—”

“But they survived,” Eve said. “Humans survived, even beyond the evacuation of the Xeelee. In a world that cared for them. You could argue this is a Utopian vision…”

“This world of theirs, with the Shell, is a four-dimensional sphere. No wonder they couldn’t figure it out.”

I thought of three-dimensional analogies. Allel’s people were like two-dimensional creatures, constrained to crawl over the surface of a three-dimensional globe. Home and Shell, the twin worlds, were like lines of latitude, above and below — each unbroken, each apparently cupping the other. Just as the diagrams in the “City” had tried to show them.

“But they were capable of understanding,” Eve said. “After a million years, humans had adapted in subtle ways. Allel had the capacity to visualize, to think in higher dimensions. She could have understood, if someone had explained it to her. As those diagrams in the place she called the City were meant to. And in time, she would figure out some of it…”

“They were trapped,” I said. “In a prison of folded space-time.”

“Perhaps,” said Eve. “Perhaps. But they didn’t give up…”

The Eighth Room

Teal slept through dawn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frost crackled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Get away from that rope.”

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

Finally one of the cows broke out of the group and approached nervously. “Pardon, ssir…”

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

The other mummy-cows giggled and whispered.

“Well?”

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

“I know about the Sun. Listen to me: I need your help. What’s your name?”

“Orange, ssir…”

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

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

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

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

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

“You know about that?” Teal asked, surprised.

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

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

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

“But in the end Allel failed. The Sun’s still cooling, and she found no answer.”

“But you will… fix-x it, ssir?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then he burst into crimson sunlight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

…But it was going to pass miles above him.

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

The Sun’s breath became a roar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Damen’s bearded face was a mask of contempt. “Why? You useless bloody fool, why?”

Something bubbled in Teal’s throat. “I… I was trying to fix…”

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

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

“Erwal… I…”

“Don’t talk.” Her voice was harsh with crying. She bathed his face.

He closed his eyes.

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

“How are you?”

Teal probed, wincing, at his ribs. “Still here. Where’s Damen?”

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

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

“Thanks…”

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

“She worries about you, you know. Erwal.”

Teal nodded ruefully through the food.

“Not good for her in her condition.” Allel’s voice was as dry as a rustle of leaves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teal found himself blushing under his blisters.

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

Teal smiled and propped himself up on one elbow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Teal wasn’t listening. “What did you mean, ‘no human’?”

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

“But mummy-cows are so simple.”

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

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

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

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

“What? What’s in the Eighth?”

Allel’s grooved face was neutral.

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

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

“Or ever.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not necessarily.” Allel’s voice was muffled.

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

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

“But…”

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

“But—”

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

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

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

…and grasped the knife.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After that he slept for most of the night.

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

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

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

“Orange… why did you follow me?”

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

“Yes, but why?”

“To… help.”

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

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

Teal lay back against her fur. “Yes,” he said. “Thank you…”

The reddening world folded away, and he slept.

They came to an abandoned City.

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

They walked on despondently.

“Did grandmother tell you what I’m trying to find?”

“Yess. The… Eight Roomss.”

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

Orange hissed, “From the ss-stories I have heard, you will… know it wh-when you ssee it…”

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

“What stories? What are you talking about?”

But the huge round face was blank.

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

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

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

He closed his eyes and struggled on.

The storm took days to clear.

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

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

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

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

A structure.

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

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

“The s-songss,” hissed the mummy-cow. “That iss what… the songs describe…”

“The Eight Rooms,” Teal sighed. “You were right. It’s unmistakable.”

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

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

He stumbled to his feet, then patted Orange’s flank. “Come on,” he said. “Just a bit further…”

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

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

Orange whimpered and buried her eyes in her trunk.

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

Teal hadn’t seen blue for a decade.

Blinking away tears, he climbed into the room.

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

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

“There’s nothing to fear — it’s just a big teepee.”

“No, it is-isn’t…”

“Well, maybe not…”

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

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

The doors watched him like blank eyes.

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

He pushed the image away.

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

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

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

Right?

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

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

Maybe it really was a reflection.

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

He stepped through the door.

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

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

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

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

He decided he wasn’t surprised.

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

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

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

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

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

In the first room, Orange was facing him. “Take it easy,” he murmured abstractedly to her. “It’s all right…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He almost cried out.

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

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

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

He opened the door.

It was the Eighth Room.

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

Orange had no way of telling the time.

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

She sang it over and over, ever faster.

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

Silence.

Was he dead?

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

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

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

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

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

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

She waited in the alien place for days.

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

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

She emerged into a blizzard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She felt her thoughts break up and crumble.

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

Allel heard the shouting from the gloom of her teepee.

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

Except…

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

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

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

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

Damen heard Erwal coming. He turned and spread his arms to catch her. “No! Ignore him. Don’t hurt yourself anymore…”

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

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

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

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

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

The other villagers drifted back to their chores.

Allel was left alone.

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

“Tell me what you saw. Tell me what was in the Eighth Room.”

Teal smiled.

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

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

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

Gradually he began to make out patterns.

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

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

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

…Something moved past the stars. And again—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She reached out a hand to her grandson.

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

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

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

“I’ve thought hard about that story… and seen past it to the truth.

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

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

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

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

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

“Well.” She wiped dampness from her eyes. “Come to my teepee. I’ve got food. And blankets.”

She turned and began to hobble back to her home.

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

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

But why here, in the ruined cradle of humanity?

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

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

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

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

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

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

History had resumed.

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

“Perhaps. Humans as Eloi, to the Xeelee’s Morlocks.”

“…Eloi?”

“Never mind. Another prophecy, much older than mine…”

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

The Baryonic Lords

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Erwal shouted: “Good day!”

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

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

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

“Sura, will you let me visit your teepee? At home there is only myself and Damen…”

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

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

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

“She needs air,” Sura said, her voice high. “It’s so musty in the teepee.”

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

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

“Sura, take care, I beg you.”

“She just needs to get warm—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then she opened her hand.

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

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

“Do you want me to come?”

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

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

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

“The Sun will recover,” Damen said wearily.

She said urgently, “But we don’t have to wait here to die. Teal said—”

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

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

“Allel was a foolish old woman.”

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

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

“What if he survived?”

“Erwal…”

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

Damen sat in silence, staring at the fire.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Singing? But why?…”

Sand closed her eyes.

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

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

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

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

“She’s dead, isn’t she?”

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

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

Erwal stood. “No, Sura. I understand.”

“You do?”

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

“Yes,” Sura said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know what to say.”

Erwal turned. Damen, thick arms folded, stood watching her. “Damen, don’t even try.”

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

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

He looked hurt. “Erwal, you could die out there.”

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

“But I need you.”

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

“I’m sorry.”

Deliberately, with a sense of pain, she turned her head from him. “It’s time to go.”

“Where?”

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

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

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

“I know. I’m sorry, Erwal; we’ve been over all of this before, haven’t we?”

“A hundred times.” She smiled.

“…I wish you well.”

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

“I won’t see you again.”

“…Perhaps if I find what I’m looking for I’ll be able to return for you.”

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

With that, they parted.

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

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

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

But winter came early in the north.

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

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

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

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

Erwal stared at the battered little artifact. “Yes, it’s Teal’s. Call the others and tell them.”

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

“The Eight Rooms! It’s just as Teal described. Come on!”

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

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

The Eight Rooms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was a body on the crystal floor.

Arke stood beside Erwal. “Are they ‘stars’?”

Shuddering, she said: “That’s the word Teal gave us.”

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

Erwal tried to speak but her throat was dry.

She forced herself to look down.

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

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

“He died alone. And so close to his goal.”

“But he didn’t die in vain. He brought us here.”

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

The others watched her, their faces pale with awe.

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

And yet…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul, bemused, withdrew for some time.

These people were clearly helpless.

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

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

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

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

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

But they had not come here for comfort.

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

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

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

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

Paul exulted. He slid quantum tendrils into her skull.

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

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

It had been like a waking dream.

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

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

But this was different.

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

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

Or she could follow these clear instructions.

And what would happen then?

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

Nothing happened.

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

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

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

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

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

Sadly this wasn’t necessary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If she had the courage to find out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Erwal kept her own counsel and watched the boy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ship quivered.

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

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

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

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

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

She turned. “What are you talking about?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

A muscle in Arke’s cheek quivered. “Erwal, what have you done?”

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

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

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

He stared at her curiously, scratching his scalp. “You talk about it as if it’s alive.”

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

“Take us back.” There was a barely controlled tremble in Arke’s voice.

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

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

She sensed the Friend hovering close by.

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

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

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

Paul exulted.

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

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

Why was he doing this? Why did he care?

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

He must consider.

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

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

Now the evolved human had gone.

The Qax considered.

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

The Qax departed, following the evolved human.

The Friend had gone.

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

And in the meantime there was the ship.

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

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

Erwal found it difficult to rest.

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

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

They could even make it fly.

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

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

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

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

“Then I’m sorry. There’s no need—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Erwal shook her head, remembering the urgency of the Friend. “I don’t think we have lifetimes, Arke.”

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

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

He scratched his chin. “But the food lockers—”

“I wouldn’t take the mummy-cow,” she said briskly. “No one would starve.”

“I don’t know…”

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

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

“Let’s talk to the others in the morning,” he said.

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

But they agreed.

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

There was a light hand on her shoulder. Erwal turned. “Sura…”

The girl smiled down at her. “Are you ready?”

“What are you doing here?”

The smile broadened. “I couldn’t let you go alone, could I?”

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

The ship quivered.

Paul brooded over the wreckage of the Solar System.

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

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

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

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

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

And of fear.

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

But there was something in the way.

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

He was being watched.

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

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

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

— Who are you? —

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

— Qax. —

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

“Where shall we go?” Sura asked innocently.

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

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

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

Sura sniffed. “Any child could see that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And what’s that?” Sura asked irritably. “Because none of this makes any sense so far.”

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

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

Erwal laughed. “Don’t be afraid. The panels won’t hurt you.”

“The box is the Eighth Room.”

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

“What’s the bright light?”

“I don’t know.”

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

Erwal shrugged. “I don’t know.”

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

“I don’t know,” Erwal said. “Maybe there were things there originally, which were destroyed. Or taken away.”

“What could they have been?”

“Oh, Sura, how should I know?”

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

“The sixth circle?”

“Yes. But how do we get there?”

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

The ship had waited a million years for this.

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

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

Sura laughed and clung to Erwal’s neck.

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

The women stared up at the view panels.

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

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

“What is it? Is it a sun?”

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

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

“Anything’s possible,” Erwal murmured.

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

“Let’s go see the smaller globes,” she said to Sura.

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

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

Sura clapped her hands, childlike.

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

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

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

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

“But it’s so frustrating!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Useful magic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then she found something.

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

The ship was rising up this tunnel.

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

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

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

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

A box had closed around Paul.

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

He couldn’t move.

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

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

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

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

That left one question: why?

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

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

…The Qax returned.

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

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

But he kept his question representations in place.

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

…And he heard hatred.

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

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

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

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

He was being moved.

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

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

And they all hated him.

The photon cage disappeared.

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

With a small part of him he looked around.

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

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

Again he was being watched.

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

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

He opened himself. New data trickled into his awareness.

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

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

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

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

The last defense of the Solar System.

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

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

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

It worked. After a fashion.

The ship computed options.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sura lowered her hands cautiously. “Is it over?”

“I think so.”

“What happened?”

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

Sura stared up at the panel. “But — look…”

The world was no longer dead.

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

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

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

It had lasted no more than a minute.

Sura said, “I think I’d like to go home now.”

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The final destruction of humanity.

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

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

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

They waited.

Eventually Teal had appeared in the Eighth Room.

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

He experienced a profound sadness.

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

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

Then the Qax would strike.

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

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

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

At length he made a decision.

She missed Damen.

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

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

Then she had an idea.

The ship rested in its place against the Eighth Room.

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

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

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

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

“It’s as if we were out there looking at it.”

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

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

Muscles in the girl’s cheeks stood out like ropes. “Well, I don’t.”

“I want to… ah, walk the window back to the village. But I’m not sure if I can find it again.”

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

“South… yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, then: the foes must be diverted.

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

Like a child seeking its mother he called the antiXeelee.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Erwal? Are you all right?”

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

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

She opened her eyes, shuddering.

Sura sat down beside her, still holding her hand. “It isn’t just dizziness, is it?”

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

Sura’s grip tightened. “Brave the snow again? But—”

“No, you don’t understand. In the ship. We have to travel in the ship.”

“But where to?”

Erwal said nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

“No, Erwal, but—”

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

“…Yes.”

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

Slowly the girl nodded. “It can’t be worse than the snow.”

“That’s right,” Erwal said firmly. “Not as bad as the snow.”

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

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

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

Erwal found it hard to blame the stay-behinds.

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

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

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

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

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

It was time.

She summoned up a memory of the shining Ring—

— the ship quivered—

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

— jump—

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

— jump—

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

— jump—

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

— jump—

— it was gone and—

— jump — jump — jumpjumpjump…

Images battered against the screens like gaudy snowflakes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At last he found it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After that things began to happen fast.

For days the ship had hurtled on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Qax assault approached its climax.

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

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

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

The humans had arrived. Paul hurried to them.

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

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

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

Erwal gripped the gloves grimly. “I can’t,” she said.

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

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

With a soundless explosion the ship erupted into clear space.

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

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

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

Sura asked, “Are you all right?”

“…I think so.”

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

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

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

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

Until it hit.

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

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

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

Soundlessly he cheered on the Qax.

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

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

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

Perhaps, perhaps.

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

Dropping out of hyperspace was like falling through ice.

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

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

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

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

She dropped into strangeness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sura asked, “What does it mean?”

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

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

“I don’t understand,” Sura said. “Did we pass through the Ring? What should we do?”

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

Sura stepped away, uncertain.

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

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

Gradually her routine broke down.

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

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

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

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

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

This, of course, was good.

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

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

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

It was much younger.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The process was creative; the ship almost enjoyed it.

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

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

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

The first clouds formed. Rain fell.

Next it was time to establish an ecosystem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ship hovered over its creation, considering.

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

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

It was done. It was good.

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

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

The open port?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Erwal laughed. “Wherever it is, it seems… agreeable.”

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

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

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

Erwal nodded. “But maybe the snows won’t be so bad here.”

“No. Maybe not.”

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

C.A.D. 500,000,000

Time passed.

After a certain point measurement of time became meaningless. For Paul this point arrived when there was no hydrogen left to burn anywhere, and the last star flickered and died.

Already the Universe was a hundred times its age when the Xeelee left.

Somberly Paul watched the dimmed galaxies subside like the chests of old men.

At last there was little free baryonic matter outside the vast black holes which gathered in the cores of galaxies. Then, as the long night of the cosmos deepened, even protons collapsed, and the remaining star-corpses began to evaporate.

Paul wearied of puzzling over the huge, slow projects of the photino birds. He sought out what had once been a neutron star. The carbon-coated sphere floating between the huge black holes was so dense that proton decay was actually warming it, keeping it a few degrees above the near-absolute zero of its surroundings; Paul, as if seeking comfort, clustered his attention foci close to this shadow of baryonic glory.

After some time he became aware that he was not alone: the last of the Qax had come sliding through the interstices of space and now hovered with him over the frigid surface of the star.

Human and Qax, huddled around the chill proton star, did not attempt to communicate. There was nothing more to say.

The river of time flowed, unmarked, towards the endless seas of timelike infinity.