Chen ran out, almost stumbling, feeling huge in the feeble gravity. Neptune's ghost-blue visage floated over them, serene, untroubled.

Waves of light already surged through the substance of the moon, sparkling from its small mountaintops. It was eerie, beautiful. The flitter was a solid, shadowed mass in the middle of the light show under the surface.

Hassan breathed hard as he dragged a still reluctant Bayliss across the flickering surface. "You think the trees, the nanobots could get into the substance of the flitter?"

"Why not? Any Interface would do; they are like viruses..."

"And ourselves? Could they get across the boundary into flesh?"

"I don't want to find out. Come on, damn it."

Logic light swarmed across a low ridge, explosive, defiant.

"They must be growing exponentially," Hassan growled. "How long before the moon is consumed? Days?"

"More like hours. And I don't know if a moon-sized mass of bucky tube carbon can sustain itself against gravity. Nereid might collapse."

Now Hassan, with his one free hand, was struggling to get the flitter's hatch open. "It will forever be uninhabitable, at the least. A prime chunk of real estate lost."

"The System's big."

"Not infinite. And all because of the arrogance of one man--"

"But," Bayliss said, her augmented eyes shining as she stroked the data cubes at her belt, "what a prize we may have gained."

"Get in the damn flitter."

Chen glanced back into the ruined dome. The splayed body of Marsden, exposed to vacuum, crawled with light.

The Pool beyond the Sky was limitless. He and his brothers could grow forever, unbounded, free of Culling! He roared out his exultation, surging on, spreading--

But there was something ahead of him.

He slowed, confused. It looked like a brother. But so different from himself, so changed.

Perhaps this had once been a brother -- but from a remote branch which had already grown, somehow, around this greater Pool.

The brother had slowed in his own growth and was watching. Curious. Wary.

Was this possible? Was the Pool finite after all, even though unbounded? And had he so soon found its limits?

Fury, resentment, surged through his mighty body. He gathered his strength and leapt forward, roaring out his intent to devour this stranger, this distant brother.

Eve said, "The great wormhole network covered the System. And everywhere, humans found life..."

Gossamer

A.D. 3825

The flitter bucked.

Lvov looked up from her data desk, startled. Beyond the flitter's translucent hull, the wormhole was flooded with sheets of blue-white light which raced towards and past the flitter, giving Lvov the impression of huge, uncontrolled speed.

"We've got a problem," Cobh said. The pilot bent over her own data desk, a frown creasing her thin face.

Lvov had been listening to her data desk's synthesized murmur on temperature inversion layers in nitrogen atmospheres; now she tapped the desk to shut it off. The flitter was a transparent tube, deceptively warm and comfortable. Impossibly fragile. Astronauts have problems in space, she thought. But not me. I'm no hero; I'm only a researcher. Lvov was twenty-eight years old; she had no plans to die -- and certainly not during a routine four-hour hop through a Poole wormhole that had been human-rated for fifty years.