She felt jubilant. At last — and just at the depth, a third of a Solar radius out from the center, that she and Kevan had deduced it would be all those years ago, she’d found what she’d come here for — the prize for which her humanity had been engineered away. At last she’d penetrated to the edge of the Sun’s dark matter shadow core, to the near-invisible canker which was smothering its fusion fire.

She waited for the photino object to return.

Arrow Maker slid toward the ground.

He passed through another layer of leaves: this was the forest’s understorey, made up of darkness-adapted palms and a few saplings, young trees growing from seeds dropped by the canopy trees. The light at this level — even now, at midday — was dim, drenched in the green of the canopy. The air was hot, stagnant, moist.

Arrow Maker reached the ground, close to the base of a huge tree. Under one of his bare soles, a beetle wriggled, working its way through decaying leaf matter. Arrow Maker reached down, absently, picked up the beetle and popped it into his mouth.

He hauled his rope down from the tree and set off across the forest floor.

Beneath the thin soil he could feel the tree’s thick mat of rootlets. The trees were supported by immense buttresses: triangular fins, five yards wide at their base, which sprouted from the clustering trunks. A thin line of termites — a ribbon hundreds of yards long marched steadily across the floor close to his feet, on their way to the tree trunk cleft that housed their nest.

He passed splashes of color amid the corruption of the forest floor — mostly dead flowers, fallen from the canopy — but there was also one huge rafflesia: a single flower a yard across, leafless, its maroon petals thick, leathery and coated with warts. A revolting stench of putrescence came from its interior, and flies, mesmerized by the scent, swarmed around the vast cup.

Arrow Maker, preoccupied, walked around the grotesque bloom.

“…Where in Lethe have you been?”

Uvarov’s chair came rolling toward Maker, out of the shadows of his shelter.

Maker, startled, stumbled backwards. “I stopped to gather figs. They were ripe. I met my daughter — Spinner-of-Rope — and — ”

Garry Uvarov was ignoring him. Uvarov rolled his chair back into the shelter, its wheels heavy on the soft forest floor. “Tell me about the stars you saw,” he hissed. “The stars…”

Uvarov’s shelter was little more than a roof of ropes and palm leaves, a web suspended between a cluster of tree trunks. Beneath this roof the jungle floor had been cleared and floored over with crudely cut planks of wood, over which Uvarov could prowl, the wheels of his chair humming as they bore him to and fro, to and fro. There were resin torches fixed to the walls, unlit. Uvarov kept his few possessions here, most of them incomprehensible to Arrow Maker: boxes fronted by discs of glass, bookslates worn yellow and faded with use, cupboards, chairs and a bed into which Uvarov could no longer climb.

None of this had ever worked in Arrow Maker’s lifetime.

Garry Uvarov was swaddled in a leather blanket, which hid his useless limbs. His head — huge, skull-like, fringed by sky-white hair and with eyes hollowed out by corruption — lolled on a neck grown too weak to support it. If Uvarov could stand, he’d be taller than Arrow Maker by three feet. But, sprawled in his chair as he was, Uvarov looked like some grotesque doll, a crude thing constructed of rags and the skull of some animal, perhaps a monkey.

Maker studied Uvarov uneasily. The old man had never exactly been rational, but today there seemed to be an additional edge to his voice — perhaps a knife-edge of real madness, at last.

And if that was true, how was he — Arrow Maker — going to deal with it?

“Do you want anything? I’ll get you some — ”

Uvarov lifted his head. “Just tell me, damn you…” His leaf-like cheeks shook and spittle flecked his chin, signifying rage. But his voice — reconstructed by some machine generations ago — was a bland, inhuman whisper.

“I climbed the kapok — the tallest tree…” Arrow Maker, stumbling, tried to describe what he’d seen.

Uvarov listened, his head cocked back, his mouth lolling.

“The starbow,” he said at last. “Did you see the starbow?”

Arrow Maker shook his head. “I’ve never seen a starbow. Tell me what it looks like.”

Rage seemed to have enveloped Uvarov now; his chair rolled back and forth, back and forth, clattering over loose floorboards. “I knew it! No starbow… The ship’s slowing. We’ve arrived. I knew it…

“They’ve tried to exclude me. Those survivalist bastard Planners, and maybe even that wizened bitch Armonk. If she’s still alive.” He wheeled about, trying to point himself at Arrow Maker. “Don’t you see it? If there’s no starbow the ship must have arrived. The journey is over… After a thousand years, we’ve returned to Sol.”

“But you’re not making sense,” Arrow Maker protested weakly. “There’s never been a starbow. I don’t know what — ”

“The bastards… The bastards.” Uvarov continued his endless rolling. “We’ve returned, to fulfill our mission — Superet’s mission, not Louise Ye bloody Armonk’s! — and they want to shut me out. You, too, my children… My immortal children.

“Listen to me.” Uvarov wheeled about to face Maker again. “You must hear me; it’s very important. You’re the future, Arrow Maker… You, poor, ignorant as you are: you and your people are the future of the species.”

He wheeled to the lip of his flooring, now, and lifted his head to Arrow Maker. Maker could see pools of congealed blood at the pits of those empty eye sockets, and he recoiled from the heavy, fetid stink of the decaying body under its blanket. “You’ll not be betrayed by your damn AS nanobots the way I was. When the ’bots withered my limbs and chopped up my damn eyes, five centuries ago, I saw I’d been right all along…

“But now we’ve come home. The mission is over. That’s what the stars are telling you, if you only had eyes to see.

“I want you to gather the people. Get weapons — bows, blowpipes — anything you can find.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re going to go back into the Decks. For the first time in centuries. You have to reach the Interface. The wormhole Interface, Maker.”

The Decks…

Arrow Maker tried to envisage going through the Locks in the forest floor, entering the unknown darkness of the endless levels beneath his feet. Panic rose, sharp and painful in his throat.

Maker stumbled away from the little hut, and back into the familiar scents of the jungle. He raised his face to the canopy above, and the glowing sky beyond.

Could Uvarov be right? Was the thousand-year journey over — at last?

Suddenly Arrow Maker’s world seemed tiny, fragile, a mote adrift among impossible dangers. He longed to return to the canopy, to lose himself in the thick, moist air, in the scent of growing things.

“Milpitas was right,” Constancy-of-Purpose said. “Your trouble is you think too much, Morrow.” Her big voice boomed out, echoing from the bare metal walls of Deck One; Constancy-of-Purpose seemed oblivious of the huge emptiness around them — the desolate dwellings, the endless, shadowed places of this uninhabited place.

Constancy-of-Purpose opened up a Lock. The Lock was a simple cylinder which rose from the floor and merged seamlessly with the ceiling, a hundred yards above their heads. Constancy-of-Purpose had opened a door in the Lock’s side, but there was also (Morrow had noticed) a hatch inside the cylinder twenty feet above them, blocking off the cylinder’s upper section.

All the Locks were alike. But Morrow had never seen an upper hatch opened, and knew no one who had.

Today, this Lock contained a pile of pineapples, plump and ripe, and a few flagons of copafeira sap. Morrow held open a bag, and Constancy-of-Purpose started methodically to shovel the fruit out of the Lock and into the bag, her huge biceps working. “You have to accept things as they are,” she went on. “Our way of life here hasn’t changed for centuries — you have to admit that. So the Planners must be doing something right. Why not give them the benefit of the doubt?”