Even half as hungry as the Human Beings were going to grow before much longer.

He looked along the gleaming cage of vortex lines which swept to red-mist infinity at the South Pole, slicing up the sky around his companions. As always — whenever he traveled even a short distance from the illusory completeness of the tribe's tiny human environ — he was struck by the immensity of the Mantle-world; and as his eye followed the converging parallels of the vortex lines he felt as if his tiny spirit, helpless with awe, was somehow drawn along the lines. The island of scattered debris which marked the site of their devastated encampment was a dirt-colored mote Air-marooned in the clean, yellow-white immensities of the Star. And his companions — nine of them still, he counted automatically — were Waving across the field lines with unconscious synchronization, ropes and nets wrapped loosely around their waists, their faces upturned to the Crust. One man had peeled away from the rest; he had found an abandoned spin-spider web slung across the vortex lines, and was searching it efficiently for eggs.

Human Beings looked so beautiful when they moved. And when a shoal of the kids went whirling along the Magfield — flapping their legs so hard you could see the glow of the induced fields shining in their limbs, and spiraling around the flux lines fast enough to turn them into blurs — well, it was hard to imagine a better sight in this or any of the fabled, lost worlds of the Ur-humans.

But at the same time humans looked so fragile, dwarfed as they were by the immensities of the vortex-line cage and by the deep and deadly mysteries of the Quantum Sea far below. Somehow an Air-pig looked the part for this environment, he thought. Round and fat and solid... Why, even a neutrino fount didn't have to be the end for an Air-pig; all it had to do was to tuck in its eyes, fold down its fins and ride out the storm. Unless it got blasted out of the Star altogether, what could happen? When the fount was done the pig could just unfold, graze on whatever foliage it could find — for trees were trees, whichever part of the Crust they were growing out of — and mate with the first Air-pig it came across. Or get mated with, Adda thought with a grin.