"You know you must. It is my time. Consolidation--"

Sculptor was appalled. "Not here. Not now!"

471 sighed. "I can feel my thoughts softening. It isn't so bad, Sculptor..."

Sculptor looked around desperately. The land was flat, hard. There was no Hillside here, no possibility of shade. And the way his father lay was wrong, with his limbs splayed around him, his torso fallen.

Urgently Sculptor scrabbled at the ice. His flesh ripped, and superfluid blood hissed from the wounds, coating his limbs; but soon he'd opened up a shallow trench. He laid his limbs once more across the still torso of 471. "If I can just roll you to the trench, then maybe there'll be some shade. Come on, father--"

But 471 didn't respond. As Sculptor dragged at him, one limb crumbled into hard fragments.

Sculptor fell across the jagged body of his father. Was this the fate which awaited him, too, to fall and perish on the unyielding ground, robbed of Consolidation immortality?

After a time he climbed away from his father. He stretched his limbs and stared around. The migration was a dark band on the horizon; here and there in their trail he saw dark mounds, the forms of more fallen folk.

Deliberately he turned away from the refugees.

His stride stiff with rage and resentment, Sculptor walked back towards his ancestral Hills.

Poole and Dzik clambered aboard the GUTship. The ship was parked fifty miles from the wormhole Interface, a hundred miles from the surface of the Kuiper object called Baked Alaska.

The ship's corridors seemed immediately crowded, stuffy, claustrophobic to Poole; he became aware of the gaze of the crew on him -- sullen, resentful. Bill Dzik hauled his bulk through the corridors with a seal-like grace. "Don't mind them. They don't like being packed away inside the ship again; they were just getting used to the open spaces of the Alaska beachhead."

"And they're blaming me?"

"You're the big bad boss who might decide to shut down their operation. Don't forget they spent a year of their lives hauling the portal out here."

"As did you, Bill," Poole said gently. "And you don't resent me."

"No." Dzik looked at him sharply. "But I don't envy you your decision either, Mike."

Baked Alaska was a million cubic miles of water, an ice moon rolling around the lip of the Sun's gravity well. Poole's consortium had hauled the first wormhole Interface out to the Kuiper Belt, linking Alaska to the distant, cosy worlds of the inner System. Poole's vision was that Baked Alaska's ice would be the fuel dump of the interstellar flights of the future. A Gibraltar, a harbor mouth for a Solar System linked by wormhole transit paths.

They reached Dzik's cabin. It was spartan, with an outsize sleeping cocoon, a zero-gee shower, a data desk unit. Poole felt grateful to close the door behind them.

Dzik strapped himself into a chair; with practiced stabs of his broad fingers he accessed the data desk. A series of messages flickered, priority-coded.