He was high. And he felt it. He stared down now, deep down, past his feet, at the emptiness which separated him from the Sea. Of course, the Net was long since lost in the Air, a distant speck. But even that, had he been able to see it, would have been a comforting break in this looming immensity...

A break from what?

Suddenly he felt as if his stomach were turning into a mass of Air, and the Magfield he was climbing seemed — not just invisible — but intangible, almost irrelevant. It was as if there was nothing keeping him up...

He shut his eyes, tight, and tried to retreat into another world, into the fantasies of his childhood. Perhaps once more he could be a warrior in the Core Wars, the epic battles with the Colonists at the dawn of time. Once humans had been strong, powerful, with magical four-walled "wormhole Interfaces" which let them cross thousands of mansheights in a bound, and great machines which allowed them to fly through the Star and beyond.

But the Colonists, the mysterious denizens of the heart of the Star, had emerged from their glutinous realm to wage war on humanity. They had destroyed, or carried off, the marvelous Interfaces and all the rest — and would have scraped mankind out of the Mantle altogether if not for the wily cunning of Farr: Farr the Ur-human, the giant god-warrior...

At length he felt a touch on his shoulder; he opened his eyes to see — not a Colonist — but Dura hovering before him, a look of careful neutrality on her face. She pointed upward. "We're there."

Farr looked up.

Leaves — six of them arranged in a neat, symmetrical pattern — hung down just above his head. With a surge of absurd gratitude Farr pulled himself up into the darkness beyond the leaves.

A branch about the thickness of his waist and coated with slick-dark wood led from the leaf into a misty, blue-glowing darkness above him... no, he thought, that was the wrong way round; somewhere up there was the trunk of the tree, suspended from the Crust, and from it grew this branch, and from that in turn grew the leaves which faced the Sea. He ran a hand along the wood of the branch; it was hard and smooth, but surprisingly warm to the touch. A few twigs dangled from the main stem, and tiny leaves sought chinks of light between their larger cousins.

He found himself clinging to the branch, his arms wrapped around it as if around the arm of his mother. The warmth of the wood seeped through his chilled body. Embarrassment flickered through his mind briefly, but he ignored it; at last he felt safe.