Slowly the images enhanced, gaining in definition and sharpness.

There were hundreds — no: thousands, millions — of the photino traces. Maybe they were standing-wave patterns, she wondered, traces of coherence on the dark matter cloud.

Slowly she built up an image in her head, a composite model of the patterns: a roughly lenticular form, with length of perhaps fifty yards — and, she realized slowly, some hints of an internal structure.

Internal structure?

Well, so much for the standing-wave theory. These things seemed to be discrete objects, not merely patterns of coherence in a continuum.

She watched the objects as they traced their orbits around the center of the Sun. The soaring lens-shapes reminded her of graphics of the contents of a blood stream; she wondered if the structures were indeed like antibodies, or thrombocytes — blood platelets, swarming in search of a wound. They swarmed over and past each other, miraculously never colliding -

No, she realized slowly. There was nothing miraculous about it. The objects were steering away from each other, as they soared through their orbits.

This was a flock. The dark matter structures were alive.

Alive and purposeful.

Slowly she drifted into the flock of photino birds (as she’d tentatively labeled them). They swooped around her, avoiding her gracefully.

They were clearly reacting to her presence. They were obviously aware — if not intelligent, she thought.

She wondered what to do next. She wished she had Kevan Scholes to talk to about this.

Sweet, patient Kevan had come to the Sun as a junior research associate; his tour of duty had been meant to be only a few years. But he’d stayed on much longer in near-Solar orbit to serve as her patient capcom, far beyond the call of duty or friendship. In the end her long distance relationship with Scholes had lasted decades.

Well, she’d been grateful for his loyalty. He’d helped her immeasurably through those first difficult years inside the Sun.

Fitfully, she tried to remember the last time he spoke to her.

In the end he’d simply been removed. Why? To serve some organizational, political, cultural change? She’d never been told.

She had come to learn, with time, that human organizations — even if staffed by AS-preserved semi-immortals — had a half-life of only a few decades. Those that survived longer persisted only as shells, usually transmuted far from the aims of their founders. She thought of the slow corruption of the Holy Superet Light Church, apparent even in her own brief time outside the Sun, into a core organization of fanatics huddled around some eternal flame of ancient belief.

A succession of capcoms had taken their places at the microphones at the other end of her wormhole link. She’d been shown their faces, by images dumped through the telemetry channels. So she knew what they looked like, that parade of ever more odd-looking men and women with their evanescent fashions and styles and their increasing remoteness of expression. Language evolution and other cultural changes were downloaded into her data stores, so the drift of the human worlds away from the time she’d grown up in (however briefly) didn’t cause her communication problems. But none of it engaged her. After Kevan Scholes she found little interest in, or empathy with, the succession of firefly people who communicated with her.

Sometimes she had wondered how she must seem to them — a cranky, antique quasi-human trapped inside a piece of rickety old technology.

Then, at last, they had stopped talking to her altogether.

Oddly, though, she still felt — in spite of everything — loyal to humanity. They’d manufactured her quite cynically for their own purposes and finally abandoned her here, in the heart of this alien world; and yet she couldn’t cut herself off from people, in her mind. After all, whether they would speak to her or not, her wormhole refrigeration link could easily have been closed down — her consciousness terminated — as trivially as turning out a light. But that hadn’t happened.

So, she thought resentfully, they hadn’t bothered to kill her off. For this did she owe them loyalty? She tried to be cynical. Should she have to bow and scrape, just for the favor of her continuing life?

But, despite her determination to be tough-minded, she found she retained a residual urge to communicate — to broadcast her news beyond the Sun, to tell all she had found out about the photino birds — just in case anyone was listening.

It wasn’t logical. And yet, she did care; it was a nagging sense of responsibility — even of duty — that she simply couldn’t flush out of her consciousness.

After a time, in fact, she had begun to grow suspicious of this very persistence. After all, she had represented quite an investment, for the Superet of her time. Her brief had been to find out what was happening to the Sun, and she could only fulfill her brief, clearly, if she reported back to somebody. So maybe the need to communicate, even with non-receptive listeners, had been deeply embedded into the programming of the systems which underlay her awareness. Perhaps it was even hard-wired into the physical systems.

After all this time, they’re still manipulating me, she thought sourly.

But even if that were true, there wasn’t much she could do about it; the result was, though, that she was left with an irritating itch — and no way to scratch it.

Morrow simply stared. He didn’t feel fear, or curiosity. The upper hatch had never opened before. And — even though his eyes told him otherwise — it couldn’t be happening now.

Beyond the hatch was a tunnel, rising upwards — the tunnel was the inside of the cylindrical Lock, he realized. The light from above the hatch was dim, greenish. The air from the cylinder felt hot, humid, laden with secret, fruit-like scents.

He tried to find some appropriate response, to formulate some plan; but this new event skittered across the habit-worn surface of his mind like mercury across glass, unable to penetrate. He could only watch the events unfold, one after the other, as if he had been reduced to the state of a child, unable to connect incidents in any causal sequence.

Constancy-of-Purpose, too, seemed to be having trouble accepting any of this. She stood in the Lock with her head tipped back, gazing up, mouth slack…

Then there was a hissing noise, a soft, moist impact.

Constancy-of-Purpose clutched her arm.

She looked at Morrow with blank incomprehension — and then it was as if her wizened legs had failed her at last, for they crumpled, slowly, bearing her down to the floor of the Lock. For a few seconds she sat, her legs folded awkwardly under her. She looked surprised, confused. Then the great torso toppled sideways, sending the legs sprawling.

At last Morrow was able to move. He rushed into the Lock and, with effort, hauled Constancy-of-Purpose upright. Constancy-of-Purpose’s eyes were open but only the whites were showing; spittle drooled from her mouth. Her skin felt moist, cold. Morrow searched frantically for a pulse at Constancy-of-Purpose’s wrist, then amid the massive tendons of her neck.

A rope curled down from the hatch above, fraying, brown. Someone — something — descended, hand-over-hand, dropping lightly to the floor.

Morrow tried to study the invader, but it was as if he couldn’t even see him or her. This was simply too strange, too shocking; his eyes seemed to slide away from the invader, as if refusing to accept its reality.

Cradling Constancy-of-Purpose in his arms, he forced himself to take this one step at a time. First of all: human, certainly. He stared at four limbs, startlingly bright eyes behind spectacles, white teeth. Very short, no more than four feet tall. A child, then? Perhaps — but with the form, the breasts and hips, of a woman. And clothed in some suit of brown, with colorful flashes; dungarees, perhaps, which -