Dura, still misty with sleep, felt a surge of affection and concern for the boy and reached out to stroke his cheek, to run gentle fingers around the quiet brown rims of his eyes.

She smiled at her brother. "Hello, Farr."

"Sorry for waking you."

"You didn't. The Star was kind enough to wake me, long before you got around to it. Another Glitch?"

"The worst one yet, Adda says."

"Never mind what Adda says," Dura said, stroking his floating hair; the hollow tubes were, as always, tangled and grubby. "We'll get by. We always do, don't we? You get back to your father. And tell him I'm coming."

"All right." Farr smiled at her again, twisted stiffly, and, with his Air-pig's fin still clutched tight, he began to Wave awkwardly across the Magfield's invisible flux paths toward the Net. Dura watched him recede, his slim form diminished by the shimmering, world-filling vortex lines beyond him.

Dura straightened to her full length and stretched, pressing against the Magfield. She kept her mouth wide open as she worked stiffness out of her limbs and back. She felt the feathery ripple of the Air as it poured through her throat to her lungs and heart, rushing through superleak capillaries and filling her muscles; her body seemed to tingle with its freshness.

She gazed around, sniffing the photons.

Dura's world was the Mantle of the Star, an immense cavern of yellow-white Air bounded below by the Quantum Sea and above by the Crust.

The Crust itself was a rich, matted ceiling, purple-streaked with grass and the hairlike lines of tree trunks. By squinting — distorting the parabolic retinas of her eyes — she could make out dark motes scattered among the roots of the trees fixed to the underside of the Crust. Perhaps they were rays, or a herd of wild Air-pigs, or some other grazing creatures. It was too distant to see clearly, but the amphibian animals seemed to be swirling around each other, colliding, confused; she almost imagined she could hear the cool sound of their distress.

Far below her, the Quantum Sea formed a purple-dark floor to the world. The Sea was mist-shrouded, its surface indistinct and deadly. The Sea itself, she saw with relief, was undisturbed by the Glitch. Only once in Dura's memory had there been a Glitch severe enough to cause a Seaquake. She shuddered like the Magfield as she remembered that ghastly time; she had been no older than Farr, she supposed, when the neutrino founts had come, sweeping half the Human Beings — including Phir, Dura's mother and Logue's first wife — away and on, screaming, into the mysteries beyond the Crust.