THE STARS — ALL EXCEPT the Star — had disappeared, dragging all the light from the sky. The Star, with its ring and its huge, bleeding companion, hung in an emptied sky...

No, she realized, that wasn't quite true. There was a bow around the sky — a multicolored ribbon, thin and perfect, which hooped around the Ur-humans' habitat — and, she saw, passed behind the Star itself.

It was a ribbon which encircled the universe, and it contained all the starlight.

Hork loomed before her, the starbow adding highlights to the gray illumination of his face. "Well?" he demanded irritably. "What now?"

She rubbed her forehead. "Each setting of that device has shown us more of our surroundings — more of the universe. It's as if successive layers, veils, have been removed from our eyes."

"Right." He lifted his eyes to the starbow. "So this must be the truth? The last setting, which strips away all the veils?" He shook his head. "But what does it mean?"

"The sky we saw before — of stars, scattered around the sky — was strange to us... even awesome. But it looked natural. The stars were just like our Star, only much further away."

"Yes, Whereas this seems distorted. And how come we can still see our Star? Why isn't its light smeared out into this absurd hoop, too?"

Smeared starlight... Yes. I like that. Good; that's very perceptive...

Dura whirled in the Air, trying to suppress a scream. The voice, dry and soft, emanating from the emptiness of the huge room behind her had been utterly terrifying.

"Karen Macrae," Hork said, his voice thick with hostility.

A sketch of shoulders and head wrought in pale, colored cubes of light hung in the Air a mansheight from them. The definition was poorer than within the underMantle — the colors washed out, the jostling light-cubes bigger. Karen Macrae opened her eyes, and again Dura was repulsed by the fleshy balls nestling within the cups.

Hork had been right; somehow Karen Macrae had ridden with them in the lump of Corestuff attached to the side of the "Pig," all the way from the depths of the Star to this remote, austere place.

The starlight is smeared; yes. And it's crucial that you understand why it's smeared, what's happening to you. The walls of this place aren't windows; they have processing capacity — they're virtually semi-sentient, actually — capable of deconvolving the Doppler distortions of...

Hork growled and Waved forward. "Talk straight, damn you."

The blurred head rotated slowly. Doppler distortion. Blue shift. You — we — are traveling enormously quickly through space. Almost as fast as light itself. Do you see? And so...

"And so we outrun starlight," Hork said. "...I think I understand. But why is it we still see the Star itself, and its system of ring and giant companion?"

The Colonist seemed to be retreating into her own half-formed head; the fleshy things in her eyecups slid around like independent animals.