"Maybe." I wrapped the bracelet around my wrist; it nestled into place like a living thing.

Disgusting. I missed human technology.

We entered orbit around the Qax planet.

Our air and water were re-absorbed by the cabin walls, then an orifice dilated and we passed through a bloody tube to space. The stars were clean and cold. I breathed freely for the first time since we'd left Earth.

Lipsey's two-man flitter was extruded from another sphincter, and we spiraled over the Qax world. Under the murky atmosphere I saw a planet-wide ocean. Submerged volcano mouths glowed like coals. There were no cities, no lights. "It's a goddamn swamp," I concluded.

Lipsey nodded cheerfully, intent on his inexpert piloting. "Yes. It's like the primeval Earth."

"So where are the Qax? Undersea?"

"Wait and see."

We landed and stepped out onto a spaceport, a metal island in a bubbling quagmire. Steam misted up my face plate. Lipsey lifted a suitcase-sized translator box down from the flitter. "Meet our client," he said.

"Where?"

He smiled. "Here! All around you."

The translator box woke up. "This is the human pilot we discussed?"

I jumped, whirled around. Nothing but swamp.

"Yes," said Lipsey, his tone deep and reassuring. "This is Jim Bolder."

"And this is really one of your best?" boomed the Qax.

I bristled. "Lipsey, what is this?"

He smiled, then stood beside me and pointed. "Look down there. What do you see?"

I stared. "Turbulent mud." Hexagonal convection cells a hand's breadth across, quite stable: the ocean was like a huge pan of boiling water.

Lipsey said: "All known forms of life are based on a cellular organization. But there are no rules about what form the cells have to take..."

I thought it over. "You're telling me that those convection cells are the basis of the Qax biology?"

I stared at the sea, trying to perceive the limits of the mighty creature. I imagined I could see thoughts hopping over the rippling meniscus like flies...

"Can we proceed?" the Qax broke in. The box gave it an appropriate voice: deep-bellied, like an irritable god.

I tried to concentrate. "Show me the Xeelee ship," I said.

"In time. Do you know what we want of you?"

"No."

"What do you know of galactic drift?" the Qax began. "Your astronomers first detected it in your twentieth century..."

The galaxies are streaming.

Like a huge liner our Galaxy is soaring through space at several hundred miles a second. That's maybe no surprise -- until you learn that all the other galaxies, as far as we can see in any direction, are migrating, too. And they're all heading for the same spot.

Standing there on that shiny island in a mud sea, I struggled with the scale of it all. Throughout a sphere a billion light years wide, galaxies are converging like moths to a flame.

But what is the flame? And -- who lit it?