Poole stared at the pictures, astonished.

Dzik slumped back in his chair and folded his fingers across his liquid belly; he gazed out of the flitter at the sparkling tube of stretched space time which surrounded them. "There's no way the authorities are going to let us go ahead and develop Port Sol now; not if it means exterminating the tree stumps. And yet the stumps are so damned dull. Mike, we've built a trillion-dollar wormhole highway to a flower bed. Even the tourist trade won't be worth a fig. I guess we can haul the wormhole Interface off to some other Kuiper object, but the cost is going to be ruinous--"

"You're saying these things are alive?"

Dzik's face was as wide and as blank as the vanished Moon. "That's the point, Mike," he said gently. "They're made of water-ice and rock, and they drink liquid helium. They're plants."

The Sun-people blazed through the sky. Sculptor cowered, flattening himself against the unfamiliar ground.

He imagined a Sun-person descending after his own Consolidation, its devilish heat scouring away the blood and bones of his hardened body. Would Sculptor be aware, residually, of the disaster? Would he still feel pain?

He pushed himself away from the broken ground. No person could Consolidate with such a threat abroad; the need to find a safe, stable Hillside -- with the proper degree of shade -- was like an ache in all of them. And so Sculptor 472 stumbled on with his people, refugees all, vainly seeking shelter from the glowing, deformed strangers.

He was already a day and a half old. Half his active life was gone. He fretted, complained to his father. He gazed around at the hulking, fleeing forms of the people, wondering which of them -- in some alternate world free of Sun-people -- might have become his mates, or his opponents in the brief, violent, spectacular wrestling contests which decided the choice of Consolidation sites. Sculptor was taller, stronger, smarter than most. In the contests he would have had no difficulty in finding a prime Hill site--

Would have had. But now, a refugee, he would never get the chance. He raised his speech membrane to the sky and moaned. Why me? Why should my generation be so afflicted?

His father stumbled. Two of his leading limbs had crumpled. He tried to bring his trailing limbs around, but he couldn't regain his balance.

With a soft, almost accepting sigh, Sculptor 471 fell heavily to the ground.

472 hurried to his side. "You must rise. Are you ill?" He grabbed his father's limbs and tried to haul him across the ice.

47l's body was tipped onto one side, his weight deforming his structure slightly, flattening it. "Leave me," he said gently. "Go on. It's all right."

The thin voice, the collapsed face, were unbearable for 472. He wrapped his limbs around his father and squeezed, as if trying to rebuild the tall, confident figure who had sheltered him in his first moments of life. "But I can't leave you."