Mur spent some time staring up at the forest, carefully committing the pattern of trunks to memory so they could find the Human Beings again.

Philas descended toward the artifact without speaking. Her thin face was intent on the goal, empty of expression; Mur hadn't seen her so focused since the death of Esk. She dug into her pouch and, with efficient regularity, bit into a piece of meat.

Mur, alone with his thoughts, fell through the vortex lines. The artifact, and the little colony around it, grew in his vision tantalizingly slowly. But it wasn't long before he could see without ambiguity that the artifact was indeed a tetrahedron, around ten mansheights to a side.

The story of the Colonists, and their Core Wars, was part of the lore of the Human Beings. When the Ur-humans first reached the Star, having traveled from their own unimaginable worlds, the Star was empty of human life. The Colonists had been the first generation to be established within the Star, by the Ur-humans. It had been their task to spawn the first of the Star's true inhabitants: all of them, the mortal, frail ancestors of the Human Beings, the people of Parz and the hinterland, all the inhabitants of the Mantle.

Compared to Human Beings the Colonists had been like gods. They had more in common with the Ur-humans, perhaps, Mur speculated. With Ur-human technology they had pierced the Mantle with wormhole links and established huge Cities which had sailed through the Mantle in vast, orderly arrays. The first generations of Human Beings had worked with their progenitors, traveling the wormhole links and building a Mantle-wide society.

Then the Core Wars had come.

As they neared the artifact, and the irregular little settlement around it, excitement gathered in Mur. Fatigue and hunger worked on him as he Waved, and he became aware that his thinking was becoming looser, more fragmented. His head seemed filled with visions, with new hopes; and the aches of his tired, protesting body seemed to fade. Could these really be Colonists, this artifact a fragment from the magical past?

He wanted to believe. He was tired — so tired — of pain, of death, of scraping his marginal existence from the unforgiving Air. To discover a Colonist artifact would be like returning to the arms of long-dead parents.

Glancing across at Philas, he recognized the same hunger to believe — to find a home — in her expression, the set of her body as she Waved.

With perhaps five hundred mansheights separating them from the artifact, two people broke from the grouping around the tetrahedron. The two came Waving cautiously up to meet Philas and Mur.

Mur slowed, and moved closer to Philas.

The pair from the tetrahedron halted a dozen mansheights below the Human Beings. They were a man and a woman, and they carried spears of wood. The woman came up a little further, and pointed her spear at Mur's belly. "What do you want?"