No. He forced himself to see. Save for a belt at the waist, bulging with pockets, this person was naked. Her skin was a rich brown. Her head was shaven at the scalp, but sported a fringe of thick, black, oiled hair. A mask of red paint sliced across her nose and eyes. She was carrying a long, fine-bored tube of wood. Her face was round — not pretty, but…

But young. She couldn’t be more than fifteen or sixteen years old.

But it wasn’t possible to AS-preserve at that age. So this was a child — a genuine child; the first he’d seen in five centuries.

She raised the tube warily, as if preparing to strike him, or fend him off.

“My name is Spinner-of-Rope,” she said. “I won’t hurt you.”

The old Underman was grotesque. Nearly as bad as Uvarov: bald, skinny, faded skin, dressed in some kind of stuffy, drab garment — and as tall as Uvarov would be, if he was laid out lengthways.

The Underman’s unconscious friend, the woman, was worse, with that huge upper body and spindly legs. The pair of them looked so old, so unnatural.

She felt revolted. There was an air of corruption about these people: of decay, of mold. She wanted to destroy them, get away, back to the clean air of the forest -

“What’s happening?” Maker’s voice came booming down the Lock shaft. “Spinner? Are you all right?”

She forced herself to put aside her emotions, to think. This tall old man was disgusting. But he was clearly no threat.

“Yes,” she called up the shaft. “I’m fine, Arrow Maker. Come down.”

She waited in silence for the few minutes it took her father — grunting, clumsy — to work his way down the rope from the forest floor. At last he dropped the last few feet to the Deck; he landed at a crouch, with his knife in one hand.

He was startled to find the two Underpeople there, but he seemed to take in the situation quickly. “Is she dead? Are you all right?”

“No, and yes.” She held up her blowpipe, apologetically. “I used this. Now, I don’t think I needed to. I — ”

“It doesn’t matter.”

The old Underman’s eyes were pale blue and watery; he seemed to be having trouble focusing on them. He pointed at the blowpipe. “You killed Constancy-of Purpose… with that?” His accent was strange, lilting, but quite comprehensible.

Spinner hesitated. “No…” She held out the pipe to him, but the Underman didn’t take it; he simply sat cradling his friend. “The pipe is bamboo. You give the darts an airtight seal inside the pipe with seed fibers. You get the poison from frogs, roasted on a spit, and — ”

“We’re sorry about your friend,” Arrow Maker said. “She will recover. And it was — unnecessary.”

The Underman looked defiant. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it damn well was.” He looked from one to the other. “What do you want?”

Spinner and her father looked at each other, uncertainly. At length Arrow Maker said, “We’ve an old man. Uvarov. He says he remembers Earth. And he says that the journey’s over — that the starship has arrived at its destination. And now we must travel to the Interface.” Maker looked at the Underman, hesitant, baffled. “Will you help us? Will you lead us to the Interface?” Then his expression hardened. “Or must we fight our way past you, as Uvarov predicts?”

The Underman stared at Maker. Somehow, Spinner thought, he seemed to be emerging from his paralysis and confusion. “Uvarov — Interface — I’ve no idea what you’re talking about…”

Then, unexpectedly, he said wonderingly, “But I’ve heard of Earth.”

The three of them stood in the cold light of the Lock, studying each other with fearful curiosity.

She descended deeper into the Sun, through the core-smothering flock of photino birds. The birds soared past and around her, tiny planets of dark matter racing through their tight Solar orbits.

The birds continually nudged toward or away from each other, like a horde of satellites maneuvering for docking. Many of the transient clusters which they formed — and swept by her, too fast to study properly — seemed immensely complex, and she stored away a succession of images. There had to be a reason for all this activity, she thought.

Some of the motion, on the fringe of the spherical flock, was simpler in pattern and easier to interpret.

Individual photino birds sailed in from beyond the flock, sweeping through the outer layers of the Sun on hyperbolic paths, and settled into the swarm of their orbiting cousins. Occasionally a bird would break away from the rest, and go soaring off on open trajectories to -

To where? Back to some diffuse ocean of dark matter beyond the Sun? Or to some other star?

And if so, why?

Patiently she watched the birds coming and going from their flock, letting the patterns build up in her head.

The hatch at the top of the Lock was jammed open, revealing a circle of luxuriant greenery. It was a window to another world. The howls of a troupe of some unimaginable animals echoed down into the metal caverns of Deck One.

Morrow stood at the base of the Lock shaft, trying to suppress the urge to run, to bury himself again in the routine rhythms of his everyday life.

Squatting around the rim of the upper hatch, peering down at Morrow, were four or five of the forest folk. They were all naked, their bare, smooth skins adorned with splashes of fruit-dye color, and they seemed impossibly young. Between them they were supporting a cradle of rope, and suspended in the cradle — descending slowly, shakily as the forest folk paid out lengths of rope — was Garry Uvarov.

The head of the extraordinary ancient protruded from a mass of thick blankets. Through the blankets Morrow could make out the chunky, mechanical box-shape of the mobile chair which sustained Uvarov, so that Uvarov looked nearly inhuman as if he had been merged with his chair, a bizarre, wizened cyborg.

The girl with the spectacles — Spinner-of-Rope — came to stand beside Morrow, at the bottom of the shaft. She wore a loose necklace of orchid-petals, and little else. Her head was at a level with Morrow’s elbow, and — now that he was growing used to her — her fierce crimson face paint looked almost comical. She touched his arm; her hand was delicate, small, impossibly light. “Don’t be afraid,” she said.

He was startled. “I’m not afraid. What is there to be afraid of? Why do you think I’m afraid? If I was afraid, would I be here helping you?”

“It’s the way you look. The way you’re standing.” She shrugged her bare shoulders. “Everything. Uvarov looks like — I don’t know; some huge larva — but he’s just a human. A very old human.”

“Actually I was thinking he looks like a kind of god. A half-human, half mechanical god. With you people as his attendants.”

She wrinkled her small nose and pushed her spectacles further up her face, smudging the paint on her cheeks; glaring up at him, she looked irritated. “Really. Well, we aren’t superstitious savages. As you Undermen think we are. Don’t you?”

“No, I — ”

“We know Uvarov is no god. He’s just a man — although a very ancient, strange and special man; a man who seems to remember what this ship was actually for.

“Morrow, I live in a tree and make things out of wood, and vine. You live — ” she waved a hand vaguely ” — in some boxy house somewhere, and make things out of metal and glass. But that’s the only difference between us. My people aren’t primitives, and we aren’t ignorant. We know that we’re all living inside a huge starship. Maybe we understand that better than you do, since we can actually see the sky.”

But that’s not the point. You and I are different, he thought, exasperated. More different than you can understand.