As it turned out, my ’pus had nothing to worry about — I found nothing all day except massive trees, rain, and a steady incline. I stopped a few hours into my walk to eat the more bearable of my food choices, giving the extras to my passenger. Then I continued on, hour after hour.

By late afternoon, I hurt all over. Not only was every muscle in my body screaming, but as I grew more fatigued, I fell down more, so I had a lot of new bruises. Fortunately, the ’pus proved adept at flinging itself away from me when I fell, so I hadn’t landed on it.

When evening approached, I assembled another moss pile for sleeping. I was again provisioned by the tree-’puses.

As I ate, I felt my mind worrying a bad thought that hadn’t quite emerged from my subconscious.

Well, best to keep it buried, I thought. Likely there’d be nothing I could do about it, anyway. I crawled into my moss and went to sleep.

Unfortunately, when I woke up, the bad thought was parked in the center of my mind, all touched up with fresh paint and a body kit.

The S-Em was made up of multiple strata, Cordus’s document had said — layered versions of parts of the world, as reshaped by different workers. Most of the strata were connected to others, but some weren’t. My thought was this: what if I couldn’t get from here to somewhere else? More importantly, what if others couldn’t get from somewhere else to here?

I’d assumed there would be people here, even if this part of the S-Em was made before humans evolved. After all, humans were nothing if not colonizers. All of the Earth had been around for eons before humans evolved, and we’d covered the whole planet.

But what if people had never found their way to this place? What if I was the only vertebrate here bigger than a frog?

Should I have stayed down near the shore?

No, what would be the point of that? I had to look for help. It was either that or hunker down and wait for a rescue that might never happen. And hope the tree-’puses remained generous. That was no way to confront my situation. I’d be back in passive-victim mode.

It was better to try to find help. If Cordus had sent a rescue party, they’d be tracking me and would probably catch up to me quickly.

I just had to keep looking for people — a village, a shack, a road, anything.

Resolved, I gathered up my ’pus and the morning offerings, and headed uphill.

By the end of the day, I still hadn’t reached the summit. The mountain seemed to go on forever.