It worked. After a fashion.

The ship computed options.

It could simply spread its wings and fly away, of course. But there would be a period, a second or so, when its discontinuity-drive impulse would match the tug of the tractor beam; and when the beam was broken the ship and its occupants could suffer a jolt.

The ship assessed the (low) probability of damage to the humans.

The second option was simpler and, the ship concluded, entailed less risk.

It fired its own starbreaker, straight down the throat of the tractor.

Sura cried out and covered her eyes; Erwal, squinting, saw how the panel's brightness dimmed to a point where she could see again.

She still looked along the curtain-tube to the Sun-world. But now a beam of intense cherry-red light threaded out of the ship and along the tube's axis, spearing the heart of the Sun-world. Around the point of impact the Sun-world glowed yellow-white; the stain of light spread until it covered perhaps a quarter of the globe's huge area.

The curtain flickered, fragmented, faded; the red beam flicked off, as if doused.

Sura lowered her hands cautiously. "Is it over?"

"I think so."

"What happened?"

Erwal changed the panel view to look out over the blocky building-world landscape, now brightly lit by the revived Sunworld. "I don't know. It's worked, whatever it was. We're no longer rising."

Sura stared up at the panel. "But -- look..."

The world was no longer dead.

Lights flickered on across the landscape; clear yellow or blue radiance poured from the doorways of the abandoned structures. Now some of the buildings began to rise from the ground, and Erwal was reminded of flowers which seek the Sun; soon the buildings were straining up at the Sun-world, their cables singing taut, and amphitheaters reached out like open palms; and for a moment she saw the machine-world as its builders must have intended it: as a place of vibrant power and industry.

Erwal felt her throat constricting. Why, she thought, it is beautiful after all. I just wasn't seeing it right.

But already the revived Sun-world light was fading; the building sank uncertainly to the ground, their interior illumination cooling to darkness.

It had lasted no more than a minute.

Sura said, "I think I'd like to go home now."

"Yes."

The ship spread its wings over the machine-world for the last time.

During his studies on the Sugar Lump Paul had learned of the history of the Qax. Paul's captor, constructed of the Virtual particle sets of the seething vacuum, resembled its forebears -- the odd, vast creatures who had spawned as constructs of convection cells in a boiling ocean -- as a laser rifle resembles a piece of chipped stone. But it could trace its consciousness back to that boiling sea.

And it remembered the human, Jim Bolder, who had once caused the Qax sun to nova.

Paul, his awareness tightly focused on the Jovian's roiling storms, began to piece together an understanding of the future plans of the Qax.