The corridor of vortex light was infinite before him. The ease of movement, after the restriction of spiraling, was exhilarating. He was moving faster than he'd ever moved in his life. He opened his mouth and yelled.

He heard Ray shouting behind him. He glanced over his shoulder. She was still chasing him, but he'd given himself a good lead. It would take her a while to catch him yet. She was cupping a hand around her mouth and calling something, even as she Surfed. He frowned and looked more closely, but he couldn't make out what she was trying to tell him. Now she was pointing at him — no, past him.

He turned his head again, to face the direction of his flight. There was something in his path.

Spin-web.

The fine, shining threads seemed to cover the sky before him. He could see where the web was suspended from the vortex line array by small, tight rings of webbing which encircled the vortex lines without quite touching the glowing spin-singularities. Between the anchor rings, long lengths of thread looped across the vortex arrays. The complex mats of threads were almost invisible individually, but they caught the yellow and purple glow of the Mantle, so that lines of light formed a complex tapestry across the sky ahead.

It was really very beautiful, Farr thought abstractedly. But it was a wall across the sky.

The spin-spider itself was a dark mass in the upper left corner of his vision. It looked like an expanded, splayed-open Air-pig. Each of its six legs was a mansheight long, and its open maw would be wide enough to enfold his torso. It seemed to be working at its web, repairing broken threads perhaps. He wondered if it had spotted him — if it had started moving already toward the point where he would impact the net, or if it would wait until he was embedded in its sticky threads.

Only a couple of heartbeats had passed since he'd seen the web, and yet already he'd visibly reduced his distance to it.

He swiveled his hips and beat at the Magfield with his Surfboard, trying to shed his velocity. But he wouldn't be able to stop in time. He looked quickly around the sky, seeking the edges of the web. Perhaps he could divert rather than stop, fly safely around the trap. But he couldn't even see the edges of the web. Spin-spider webs could be hundreds of mansheights across.

Maybe he could break through the web, burst through to the other side before the spider could reach him. It had to be impossible — there were layers to the web, a great depth of sticky threads before him — but it seemed his only chance.