He jammed his eyes closed and wrapped his arms around himself, feeling his own bony elbows digging into his ribs. How strange it was that he had never slept more deeply in his life than in these impossibly difficult times. While waking life had become steadily more unbearable, sleep was ever more comfortable, seductive, a different realm in which his physical pain and mental distress dissolved.

If only I could stay there, he thought. How easy it would be never to wake up again...

But already the pain had dug too far into his awareness for that option to be available today.

With a sigh he opened his eyes and probed at the cups with one finger, working at rims sharp with crusty sleep deposits. Then he clambered slowly out of his loose sling of ropes. The rest of the Human Beings — the other fourteen — were scattered across the lower rim of the forest, bound by similar loops of rope. Dangling there half-asleep they looked like the pupae of insects, deformed spin-spiders perhaps.

Mur dropped out of the forest, avoiding the eyes of those others who were awake.

He stretched, his muscles still aching from yesterday's Waving. He pulled a handful of leaf-matter from the tree, and then flexed his legs and Waved stiffly down into the Mantle. Perhaps twenty mansheights below the fringe of the forest ceiling he lifted his tunic and raised his legs to his chest. His hips and knees protested, but he grabbed his lower legs and pulled his thighs close to his stomach. At first his bowels failed to respond to this prompting — like the rest of his system his digestive and elimination processes seemed to be failing, slowly — but he persisted, keeping his arms wrapped around his legs.

At last his lower bowel convulsed, and — with a stab of pain which lanced through the core of his body — a hard packet of waste was expelled into the Air. He glanced down. The waste, floating down into the Mantle, was compact, too dark.

He cleaned himself with his handful of leaves.

Dia, his wife, came drifting down from the impromptu camp in the forest. As she descended, he saw how she was blinking away the remnants of sleep and compressing her eyecups against the brightness of the Air; but she was already — just moments after waking — squinting along the vortex lines into the South, toward the distant Pole, trying to assess how far they had come, how much further was left of this huge odyssey.

When she reached Mur she looked into his face, kissed him on the lips, and wrapped her arms around his chest. He folded his arms around her and rubbed her back. Through her shabby poncho he could feel the bones of her spine. They had nothing to say to each other, so they clung to each other, hanging in the silent Air, with the Quantum Sea spread below them.