Perhaps the Colonists had expected the Human Beings to die off, Mur wondered. But they hadn't. Indeed, if Dura's tales of Parz and its hinterland were accurate, they had begun to construct a new society of their own, using nothing but their own ingenuity and the resources of the Star. A civilization which — if not yet Mantle-wide — was at least on a scale to bear comparison with the great days of the ancients.

"The wormholes collapsed," the woman said. "Most of the Interfaces were taken away into the Core. But some of them were left behind, like this one. But its vortex-light died. Now it just drifts around in the Magfield..."

"I wonder what happened to the people inside the wormholes," Mur said. "When the holes collapsed."

Philas came drifting out of the tetrahedron. "Come on, Mur," she said tiredly.

Mur thanked Borz for the scrap of food, and nodded to the woman — whose name, he realized, he'd never learned.

The pair barely reacted, and their scowls seemed to be returning. Their spears had never left their hands, Mur noticed.

They Waved out of the little encampment. A child jeered at them, until silenced by a parent; Mur and Philas didn't look back.

They began to Wave upward, side by side.

Mur gazed up at the Crust-forest. "That seems a hell of a long way back," he said. "To have come all this way, for a handful of meat..."

"Yes," Philas said savagely, "but we might have found riches. Riches beyond imagining. We had to come."

"I wonder why they stay here, close to the Interface. Do you think it protects them, when Glitches come?"

"I doubt it," Philas said. "After all, the thing floats freely, they said. It's just a relic, a ruin from the past."

"Then why do they stay?"

"For the same reason Dura's City folk built their City at the Pole." Philas waved her hands at the empty Mantlescape, the arching vortex lines. "Because it's a fixed point, in all this emptiness. Something to cling to, to call home." She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand; already she seemed short of breath. "Better than drifting, like we do. Better than that."

Mur lifted his face to the Crust-forest and Waved hard, ignoring the gathering ache in his hips, knees and ankles.

19

DURA MADE SURE IT WAS SHE, not Farr, whom Hork chose to go on the journey into the underMantle.

At first Adda tried to explain Dura's reasoning to Farr, to provide a bridge between them; but he could see that Farr was devastated. The boy mooched around the Upside apartment Hork had loaned the Human Beings like a trapped Air-pig. Adda wistfully watched him prowl, recalling Logue as a young man. The underMantle journey had many potent elements for Farr — the chance to protect his sibling by taking her place, the intrinsic excitement of the jaunt itself. Farr was still such a mélange of boy and man.