Now the man turned to Thea. With a single, feathery beat of his legs he Waved to her. The suit was of some black material inlaid with silvery whirls and threads. Apart from a large seam down the front of the chest, the suit was an unbroken whole, complete like an spin-spider eggshell. Behind the half-reflective helmet plate she could see a face -- surprisingly thin, with two dark eyecups. When he spoke, his voice was harsh, but sounded as natural as if he were one of her own people.

"Are you all right? Are you hurt?"

Before Thea could answer Lur came Waving clumsily out of the sky, her small breasts shaking. Lur grabbed at Thea's cocoon and clung to it, burying her face in Thea's neck, sobbing.

Thea saw the stranger's shadowed gaze slice over Lur's body with analytical interest.

Thea encompassed Lur's shoulders in her arms. She kept her eyes fixed on the man's face. "Are you real? I mean -- are you him? The Hero?"

Was it possible?

He looked at her and smiled obscurely, his face indistinct in the shadows of his suit.

She tried to analyze her feelings. As a child, when she'd envisaged this impossible moment -- of the actual arrival of the Hero, from out of nowhere to help her -- she'd always imagined a feeling of safety: that she would be able to immerse herself in the Hero's massive, comforting presence.

But it wasn't like that. With his face half-masked the Hero wasn't comforting at all. In fact he seemed barely human, she realized.

Behind the translucent pane, the Hero's eyes returned to Lur, calculating.

Her father wept.

Wesa's thin, tired face, under its thatch of prematurely yellowed hair-tubes, was twisted with anguish. "I couldn't reach you. I could see what was happening, but--"

Embarrassed, she submitted to his embrace. Wesa's thin voice, with its words of self-justification, had less to do with her safety than with working out his own shock and shame, she realized.

As soon as she could, she got away from her father's clinging grasp.

Her people were clustered around the Hero.

The Hero ran a gloved thumb down the seam set in the suit's chest panel; the suit opened. He peeled it off whole, as if he were shedding a layer of skin. Under the suit he wore only gray undershorts, and his skin was quite sallow. He was much thinner than he'd seemed inside the suit, although his muscles were hard knots.

Thea felt repelled. Just a man, then. Is that all there is to it? And an old man, too, with yellowed hair-tubes and sunken, wrinkled face -- older than anyone in her tribe, she realized.

He passed the suit to Wesa. Thea's father took the ungainly thing and tied it carefully to a tree branch. Suspended there, its empty limbs dangling and its chest sunken and billowing, the suit looked still more grotesque and menacing -- like a boned man, she thought.