Farr's face suddenly appeared outside the ship, at the window opposite Dura. His expression was solemn, empty. He was Waving hard, she realized; they must be descending rapidly already, and soon he and the other Wavers would not be able to keep up.

Farr must have given Adda the slip. And so, after all, here was a last good-bye. She forced herself to smile at Farr and raised her hand.

There was a thud from the hull of the "Flying Pig"; the little craft shuddered in the Air before settling again.

Dura frowned. "What was that?"

Hork looked up, his wide face bland. "The Harbor cable cutting loose. Right on schedule." He glanced out of the window at the dark shadows of the superconducting hoops. "We're falling under our own power now; the currents in the hoops are Waving us deeper into the Star. And the hoops are the only way we're going to get back home... We're alone," he said. "But we're on our way."

20

THREE METERS DEEP.

It was a depth Dura couldn't comprehend. Humans were confined within the Mantle to a shell of superfluid Air only a few meters thick. Her first journey with Toba to the Pole from the upflux — so far that she had felt she was traveling around the curvature of the Star itself — had only been about thirty meters.

Now she was drilling whole meters into the unforgiving bulk of the Star itself. She imagined the Star crushing their tiny wooden boat and spitting them out, like a tiny infestation. And it was small comfort to remember that their journey would be broken before reaching such a depth only if they achieved their goal... if the unimaginable really did, after all, emerge from the Core to greet them.

By the end of the second day they were already well below the nebulous boundary of the habitable layer of Air. The yellow brightness of the Air outside the windows had faded — to amber, then a deeper orange, and finally to a blood-purple color reminiscent of the Quantum Sea. Dura pressed her face against cold clearwood, hoping to see something — anything: exotic animals, unknown, inhuman people, some kind of structure inside the Star. But there was only the muddy purple of the thickening Air, and her own distorted, indistinct reflection in the wood-lamps' green light. She was trapped in here — with her fears, and with Hork. She had expected to feel small, vulnerable inside this tiny wooden box as it burrowed its way into the immense guts of the Star; but the thick darkness beyond the window made her claustrophobic, trapped. She retreated into herself. She tended the fretting pigs, slept as much as she could, and kept her eyes averted from Hork's.

His determined efforts to talk to her, on the third day, were an intrusion.

"You're pensive." His tone was offensively bright. "I hope this adventure isn't causing you any — ah — philosophic difficulties."