He ran all day. His pack bounced against his back, nearly empty of food. He was glad he was nearing his next cache. Sometimes on runs he took only a few handfuls of cereal and lived off the land as best he could, gathering pine nuts and fishing; but on trips of that kind half of every day had to be spent in the search for food, and there wasn’t much to be found. When the fish were biting a lake was an incredible cornucopia. Lake people. But on this run he was going full tilt from cache to cache, eating seven or eight thousand calories a day, and still ravenous every evening. So when he came to the little arroyo containing his next cache, and found the arroyo’s side wall collapsed in a landslide over it, he shouted with dismay and anger. He even dug for a while at the pile of loose rock; it was a small slide; but a couple of tons would have to be removed. No chance. He would have to run hard across Ophir to the next cache, and go hungry. He took off in the very moment of realization, thinking to save time.

Now he looked for edible things as he ran, pine nuts, meadow onions, anything. He ate the food left in his pack very slowly, chewing it for as long as he could, trying to imagine it to some higher level of nutrient value. Savoring every bite. Hunger kept him awake part of every night, though he slept heavily through the hours before dawn.

On the third day of this unexpected hunger run he emerged from the forest just south of Juventa Chasma, in land broken by the ancient Juventa aquifer outbreak. It was a lot of work to make his way through this land on a clean line, and he was hungrier than he could ever remember being; and his next cache still two days away. His body had eaten all its fat reserves, or so it felt, and was now feeding on the muscles themselves. This autocannibalism gave every object a sharp edge, tinged with glories— the whiteness shining out of things, as if reality itself were going translucent. Soon after this stage, as he knew from similar past experiences, the lung-gom-pa state would give way to hallucinations. Already there were lots of crawling worms in his eyes, and black dots, and circles of little blue mushrooms, and then green lizardlike things scurrying along in the sand, right before the blurs of his feet, for hours at a time.