Dura worked with the Air-pigs, feeding and patiently soothing as their farts drove the turbine. To bring the "Pig" to the wormhole mouth Hork had taken the ship through a long, flat sweep to a position above one facet of the Interface. Through the wide windows she watched the wormhole gate sink briefly into the turgid glimmering of the underMantle, to reemerge as if surfacing as they approached it once more.

Now the Interface rose toward them, like an outstretched hand framed in the clearwood panel set into the base of the ship; within it light flashed, impossibly distant and vortex-line blue.

Hork worked his controls with savagery. For all his outer flippancy in the earlier stages of the voyage, he seemed to have become enraged since the encounter with Karen Macrae. Or perhaps that anger had been there in him all along, Dura thought; perhaps he had always resented the position of humans, left stranded and helpless in this Star. But now, for the first time, he had a focus for that rage: Karen Macrae, and her intangible Colonist companions in the Core of the Star.

Dura wondered at her own composure. She was fearful, yes; and an inner fluidity threatened to overwhelm her as she stared into the approaching maw of the wormhole. But at the same time, she realized, she was not confronting the unknown, as was Hork. The lore of the Human Beings was calm, detailed and analytical. The universe beyond the Star, the universe of the past beyond the here-and-now: those realms were abstract, remote, but they were as real to Dura as the world of Air, pigs, trees. Although she had never seen them she had grown up with the Xeelee and their works, with the artifacts of the Ur-humans, and to her they were no more exotic than the wild Air-boars of the Crust.

Perhaps, in the end, the lore of the Human Beings — their careful, almost obsessive, preservation of apparently useless knowledge from the past — was actually a survival mechanism.

The Interface was very close now, Dura saw; the fine, perfect vertices of the upper face spread away from the curving window of the ship, and the rest of the frame was foreshortened by perspective.

Then the clean lines of the artifact began to slide across the windows of the ship, as slow as knife-blades drawn across skin. The ship's downward trajectory had been carrying it steadily toward the center of the face; but now they were clearly drifting, sliding toward one knife-sharp edge.

Something was wrong.

Hork hauled at his levers and slammed his hand into the fragile console. "Damn it. She won't respond. The Magfield here is disrupted — maybe by the presence of the Interface — and..."

"Look!" Dura pointed downward.

Hork stared at the edge, its fizzing blue light painting deep, shifting shadows on his face as it approached. He swore. "It's going to hit us."