There was a buzz of anticipation from the Box, answered by a buzz from the Stadium. Muub touched Adda's arm and pointed upward. "Look. The Surfers. Do you see them?"

The Surfers were a hexagonal array, shining motes scattered across the Air. Even Muub, despite his detachment, seemed thrilled as he stared up, evidently wondering how it would be to ride the flux so high, so far from the City.

But Adda was still troubled by the light change. He scoured the horizon, cursing the distortion of the clearwood wall before him.

Then he saw it.

Far upflux, far to the north, the vortex lines had disappeared.

—

Its — her — name was Karen Macrae. She had been born in a place called Mars, a thousand years ago.

That's Earth-standard years, she said. Which are about half of Mars' years, of course. But they're the same as your years... We designed your body-clocks to match the standard human metabolic rate, you see, and we got you to count the rhythms of the neutron star so that we have a common language of days, weeks, years... We wanted you to live at the same rate as us, to be able to communicate with us. Karen Macrae hesitated. With them, I mean. With standard humans.

Dura and Hork looked at each other. He hissed, "How much of this do you understand?"

Dura stared at Karen Macrae. The floating image had drifted away from the center of the cabin, now, and seemed to be growing coarser; it was not a single image, in fact, but a kind of mosaic formed by small, jostling cubes of colored light. Dura asked, "Are you an Ur-human?"

Karen Macrae fizzed. A what? Oh, you mean a standard human. No, I'm not. I was, though...

Karen Macrae and five hundred others had come to the Star from — somewhere else. Mars, perhaps, Dura thought. They had established a camp outside the Star. When they'd arrived the Star had been empty of people; there were only the native lifeforms — the pigs, the rays, the spin-spiders and their webs, the Crust-trees.

Karen Macrae had come to populate the Star with people.

The structure of a neutron star is astonishingly rich, whispered Karen Macrae. Do you realize that? I mean, the Core is like a huge, single nucleus — a hypernucleus, laced with twenty-four percent hyperonic matter. And it's fractal. Do you know what that means? It has structure on all scales, right down to the...

"Please." Hork held up his hands. "This is a storm of words, conveying — nothing."

The blocks of Karen's face jostled like small insects. I am a first-generation Colonist, she said. We established a Virtual environment in the hypernucleus — in the Core. I was downloaded via a tap out of my corpus callosum — downloaded into the environment here, in the Core. Karen Macrae brought veils of skin down over the pulpy, obscene things nestling in her eyecups. Do you understand me?