"We're putting it back together again," Toba said. "Slowly. Ito is... bearing up. She's very quiet." For a moment his small, almost comical mouth worked as if he were struggling to express his feelings. "You know Farr's there with her. And some of Cris's friends, the Surfers. Cris has gone. But I think Ito finds the young people around her a comfort."

Dura touched his arm. "It's alright. You don't have to say anything. Come on; maybe you can help me sort out Lea and Mur..."

Toba climbed out of his car.

Together, they made their way through the City site. Parz had become a cloud of floating fragments of Skin, twisted lengths of Corestuff girder, all suffused by the endless minutiae of the human world, spilled carelessly into the Air. She could see, at the cloud's rough center, the execution Wheel, cast adrift from the old Market. Even from this vantage point — close to the cloud's outer edge — Dura could see clothes, toys, scrolls, cocoons, cooking implements: the contents of a thousand vanished homes. Those few sections of the City which had survived the final Glitch continued to collapse spasmodically — even now, weeks after the withdrawal of the Xeelee — and to the careless eye the swarms of humans crawling over the floating remains must look, she thought, like leeches, scavengers hastening the destruction of some immense, decomposing corpse, adrift in the turgid Air of the Pole. Many of the City's former inhabitants, recently refugees, had returned to Parz to seek belongings and to help with the reconstruction. There had been some looting, true — and too many people had come back here, intent on picking over the remains of a City which would not be restored to anything like its former completeness for many years.

But Hork's emergency edicts against a mass return to the City seemed to be holding. Enough of the City's former inhabitants had dispersed to the recovering ceiling-farms of the hinterland — and stayed there to work — to reduce fears of famine. And genuine reconstruction and recovery was progressing now. Already teams of workers had succeeded in locating the surviving dynamos. The great engines — which had once powered anchor-band currents — had been cleared of rubble and stumps of infrastructure. Now the dynamos floated in clear spaces, their lumpy Corestuff hides gleaming dully in the purple light of the Quantum Sea as if they were immense, protected animals.

It could still go wrong, Dura thought uneasily. The fragile society left adrift by the Xeelee Glitch could still fall apart — disintegrate into suicidal conflict over dwindling resources, over once-precious goods from the old Parz which had been reduced in value to trinkets by the disaster.

But not just yet. Now, people seemed — on the whole — to be prepared to work together, to rebuild. This was a time of hope, of regeneration.