Adda closed his eyes. There had been a grandeur about that huge death. Almost a grace, a defiance of the Xeelee's actions which had been, in its way, magnificent.

"Adda." Farr was pulling at his arm and pointing.

Adda followed the boy's finger. At first he could see nothing — only the lurid crimson glow around the Northern horizon, the yellow chaos of the Air...

Then he realized that the boy was pointing out an absence.

The starbreaker beams were gone.

Adda felt something lift from his heart. Perhaps some of them might yet live through this.

But then more vortex fragments came gusting toward them, precluding thought; gripping the boy's hand as hard as he could, Adda stared into the mouth of the storm and grabbed at Bzya's cocoon.

28

THE INTERFACE WAS GLOWING.

The shouting woke Borz from a deep, untroubled sleep. He stretched and scowled around, looking for the source of the trouble. He reached to his belt and pulled out his Air-hat, jammed it on his head. He didn't really need the hat, of course, but he thought it gave him a bit more authority with the scavenging, thieving upfluxers who came by all the time and...

The Interface was glowing. The edges around its four triangular faces were shining, vortex-line-blue, so bright he was forced to squint. And the faces themselves seemed to have been covered over by a skin of light, fine and golden, which returned reflections of the yellow Mantle-light, the vortex lines, his own bulky body.

A deep, superstitious awe stirred in Borz.

There was no sign of the pigs, which had been stored at the heart of the tetrahedron. And the various possessions — clothes, tools, weapons — which had been attached to the tetrahedron's struts by bits of rope and net now tumbled around in the Air. A length of rope drifted past him. He grabbed it and laid it in his huge palm; the rope looked scorched.

People, adults and children alike, were Waving away from the Interface, crying and wailing in their panic. Borz — and two or three of the other men and women — held their place.

The Interface hadn't worked for generations — not since the Core Wars; everyone knew that. But it was obviously working now. Why? And — Borz ran a tongue over his hot, Airless lips, and he felt the pores on his face dilate — and what might be coming through it?

The face-light died, slowly. The faces turned transparent once more. The glow of the tetrahedral frame faded to a drab blackness.

The Interface was dead again; once more it was just a framework in the Air. Borz felt an odd, unaccustomed stab of regret; he knew he'd never again see those colors, that light.