"Now, then, miner," Pallis said briskly, "we've got a tree to fly. Let's get the bowls brimming; I want a canopy up there so thick I could walk about on it. All right?"

The tree had passed the highest layer of the forest. The Raft turned from a landscape into an island in the air, crowned by a mass of shifting foliage. The sky above Rees seemed darker than usual, so that he felt he was suspended at the very edge of the Nebula, looking down over the mists surrounding the Nebula's Core.

And in all that universe of air the only sign of humanity was the Raft, a scrap of metal suspended in miles of air.

His heart lifted, bursting with the exhilaration of a thousand questions.

"Did Rees find his answers?"

Eve just smiled, and the images, of the glowing Nebula and its mile-wide stars, faded from my view, receding into a scrap of crimson light, a spark lost in the greater blaze of human history...[5]

The assaults continued, waves of them, generations of humans battering against the great Xeelee defenses... and leaving shards of humanity stranded in the great spaces around the Xeelee Prime Radiant.

At last, even those broken shards became weapons of war.

The Tyranny of Heaven

The Tyranny of Heaven

A.D. 171,257

We may with more successful hope resolve
To wage by force or guile eternal war
Irreconcilable to our grand Foe,
Who now triumphs, and in the excess of joy
Sole reigning holds the tyranny of heaven...

Paradise Lost, John Milton

Rodi climbed through the hatch and into the flitter. The craft was a box the size of a small room. He threaded his way through the interior.

There was a girl in one of the pilot seats. She turned. Tall and muscular, she wasn't much older than Rodi's twenty years.

Rodi tripped over a locker.

The girl's eyes glittered with amusement. "Take it easy. You're Rodi. Right? I'm Thet."

His face hot, Rodi took the seat beside her. "Glad to meet you." The instrument panel before him looked utterly alien.

"Well, buckle in." Thet punched fat buttons. Monitors showed muscles contracting in the Ark's hull. "And don't be so nervous."

"I'm not."

"Of course you are. I never understand why. You've taken flitters outside the Ark before, haven't you?"

"Sure." He tried not to sound defensive. "On inter-Ark hops. But this is my first mission drop -- my first time out of hyperspace. It's a little different."

She raised fine eyebrows. "We didn't evolve in hyperspace."

"Maybe. But it's all I know--"

An orifice in the hull opened and exploded at them; the flitter surged into hyperspace. It was like being born.

A Virtual image of the Ark swam into their monitors. Holism Ark was a Spline ship: a rolling, fleshy sphere encrusted with blisters. It was a living being, Rodi mused, and it looked like it.

He wondered briefly what those blisters on the hull were. They couldn't be seen from within the Ark...