"Then how did they hear? Or smell, or taste?"

He growled impatiently. "How the hell should I know? Anyway, I think this third chamber is designed to let us see the universe the way the Ur-humans did." He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "And there's still a setting left on the arrow-console, the fourth one... we haven't finished with our ways of seeing yet."

She'd forgotten about that last setting. Some core of her, buried deep inside, quailed a little further.

Turning in the Air she looked around, still searching for patterns. The sky wasn't uniformly dark, she realized; the elusive gas faded up from gray to a deep, crimson glow on the far side of the room. "Come on. I think there's something beyond the wormhole chamber..."

Still holding hands, they Waved past the control chair and around the darkened tetrahedron which contained the wormhole portal and the "Pig." Through the open door, Dura glimpsed their craft; its roughly hewn wooden walls, its bands of Corestuff, the slowly leaking stink of Air-pig farts, all seemed unbearably primitive in this chamber of Ur-human miracles.

The sky-glow intensified as they neared its source. At last the glow drowned out the stars. Dura felt herself pull back, shying away from new revelations. But Hork enclosed her fingers in a tight, smothering grip and coaxed her forward. "Come on," he said grimly. "Don't fold on me now." At the center of the glowing sky was a single star: tiny, fierce and yellow-red, brighter than any other in the sky. But this star wasn't isolated in space. A ring of some glowing gas circled the star, and — still more astonishing — an immense globe of light hung close to the fierce little star. The globe was like a star itself, but attenuated, bloated, its outer layers so diffuse as almost to merge with the all-pervading gas cloud. Tendrils of gray light snaked from the globe-star and reached far into the ring of gas.

It was like a huge sculpture of gas and light, Dura thought. She was stunned by the spectacle, and yet charmed by its proportion, scale, depths of shading and color.

She was seeing the gas ring around the star from edge-on... in fact, she realized slowly, the Ur-human construct around her was actually inside the body of the ring. And she could see beyond the central star to the far side of the gas ring; distance reduced the ring's far limb to a line of light on which the little star was threaded, like a pendant.

She could see turbulence in the ring, huge cells big enough to swallow a thousand of the Ur-human colonies. The cells erupted and merged, changing as she watched despite their unthinkable scale. And there seemed to be movement around the star, a handful of sparks dipping into its carcass...

"Then it's true," Hork breathed.

"What?"