She found Billy Anker and Mona the clone lying half out of the long cobalt shadows. Mona was already dead, her pretty blonde head resting on the upper part of Billy’s chest. He had one arm round her shoulders. With his other hand he was still stroking her hair. As she died she had been looking intently into his face, and had placed one leg between both his, trying to get some final comfort out of life. Under the instructions of the old algorithm—which, provided so suddenly with raw material for its endless repetition, had sifted stealthily down onto them from the structures above—their cells were turning to feathers. Billy Anker’s legs looked like a peacock satyr’s. Mona was gone all the way to diaphragm, blue-black dusty feathers which seemed to shift and grow and do something odd to the light.

Seria Mau’s fetch—in these conditions little more than a shadow itself—wove nervously about in front of the lovers. How could I have done this? she thought, while she said aloud:

“Billy Anker, is there any way I can help?”

Billy Anker never stopped stroking the dead woman’s hair, or looking away from her.

“No,” he said.

“Does it hurt?”

Billy Anker smiled to himself. “Kid,” he said, “it’s more comfortable than you’d think. Like a good downer.” He laughed suddenly. “Hey, the wormhole was the spectacle. You know? That’s what I keep remembering. That was how I expected to go.” Silent a moment, he contemplated that. “I could never even describe what it was like in there,” he said. Then he said, “I can hear this thing counting. Or is that some sort of illusion?”

Seria Mau came as close to him as she could.

“I can’t hear anything. Billy Anker, I’m sorry to have done this.” At that, he bit his lip and finally looked away from Mona the clone.

“Hey,” he said. “Forget it.”

He convulsed. Dust billowed up from the stealthily shifting surface of his body. The algorithm was reorganising him at all scales. For a moment his eyes filled with horror. He hadn’t expected this. “It’s eating me!” he shouted. He flailed with his arms, clutched at the dead woman as if she might help him. Forgetting she was only a fetch, he tried to clutch at Seria Mau too. Then he got control of himself again. “The more you deny the forces inside, kid, the more they control you,” he said. His hand went through her like a hand through smoke. He stared at it in surprise. “Is this happening?” he asked.

“Billy Anker, what am I to do?”

“That ship of yours. Take it deep. Take it to the Tract.”

“Billy, I—”