Consolidation.

Sculptor, unable any longer to move, stared at the place where the Sun-person had stood. The ice was melted, blasted, flowed together, the Hills flattened.

But the Sun-person had built the Hill that shaded Sculptor now. Somehow the Sun-person had understood and helped Sculptor. Now the Sun-person had gone, back to the world that had borne him.

Sculptor's thoughts softened, slowed. His awareness seemed to expand, to encompass the slow, creaking turn of the world, the ponderous vegetable pulse of his hardening body.

His name melted away.

His father's face broke up, the fragments falling away into darkness.

At the end only one jagged edge of consciousness remained, a splinter of emotion which impaled the blazing image of the Sun-person.

It wasn't hatred, or resentment. It was envy.

Eve said, "As Poole and his followers opened up the Solar System -- as they undid the relative isolation of previous centuries -- they shone a clear light into darkened corners of their own history. Watch..."

The Logic Pool

A.D. 3698

This time he would reach the Sky. This time, before the Culling cut him away...

The tree of axiomatic systems beneath him was broad, deep, strong. He looked around him, at sibling-twins who had branched at choice-points, most of them thin, insipid structures. They spread into the distance, infiltrating the Pool with their webs of logic. He almost pitied their attenuated forms as he reached upwards, his own rich growth path assured...

Almost pitied. But when the Sky was so close there was no time for pity, no time for awareness of anything but growth, extension.

Little consciousness persisted between Cullings. But he could remember a little of his last birthing; and surely he had never risen so high, never felt the logical richness of the tree beneath him surge upwards through him like this, empowering him.

Now there was something ahead of him: a new postulate, hanging above him like some immense fruit. He approached it warily, savoring its compact, elegant form.

The fibers of his being pulsed as the few, strong axioms at the core of his structure sought to envelop this new statement. But they could not. They could not. The new statement was undecidable, not deducible from the set within him.

His excitement grew. The new hypothesis was simple of expression, yet rich in unfolding consequence. He would absorb its structure and bud, once more, into two siblings; and he knew that whichever true-false branch his awareness followed he would continue to enjoy richness, growth, logical diversity. He would drive on, building theorem on mighty theorem until at last -- this time, he knew it would happen -- this time, he would touch the Sky itself.

And then, he would--

But there was a soundless pulse of light, far below him.

He looked down, dread flooding him. It was as if a floor of light had spread across the Pool beneath him, shining with deadly blandness, neatly cauterizing his axiomatic roots.

A Culling.

In agony he looked up. He tried to nestle against the information-rich flank of the postulate fruit, but it hung -- achingly -- just out of reach.