She looked absurd. But she reminded Morrow, disturbingly, of his own first reaction to Spinner-of-Rope.

Perpetuation scurried off the path, ran around them, and continued on her way without looking back. Spinner seemed to relax. She slung her blowpipe over her shoulder once more.

“For the love of Life,” Morrow snapped at the girl, suddenly impatient, “you were in no danger from that poor woman. She was terrified. Couldn’t you see that?”

Spinner returned his stare, wide-eyed.

Uvarov turned up his blind face; Arrow Maker explained briefly what had happened. Uvarov barked laughter. “You are wrong, Morrow. Of course Spinner was in danger here. We all are.”

Arrow Maker, plodding beside Morrow, frowned. “I don’t understand. This place is strange, but I’ve seen no danger.”

Morrow said, “I agree. You’re under no threat here…”

Uvarov laughed. “You think not? Maker, try to remember this lesson. It might keep you alive a little longer. The most precious thing to a human being is a mind-set: more precious than one’s own life, even. Human history has taught us that lesson time and again, with its endless parade of wars — human sacrifices en masse — thousands of deaths over the most trivial of differences of religious interpretation.

“We do not fit into the mind-set of the people within these Decks. That poor woman walked around us, convincing herself we are not real! By our presence here — by our very existence, in fact — we are disturbing the mind-set of the people here… in particular, of those ancients who control this society.

“They may not even realize it themselves, but they will seek to destroy us. The lives of three or four strangers is a cheap price to pay for the preservation of a mind-set, believe me.”

“No,” Morrow said. “I can’t accept that. I don’t always agree with the Planners. But they aren’t killers.”

“You think not?” Uvarov laughed again. “The survivalists — your ‘Planners’ are psychotic. Of course. As I am. And you. We are a fundamentally flawed species. Most of humanity, for most of its history, has been driven by a series of mass psychotic delusions. The labels changed, but the nature of the delusions barely varied…”

Uvarov sighed. “We built this marvelous ship — we created Superet. We dreamed of saving the species itself. We launched, toward the stars and the future…

“But, unfortunately, we had to take the contents of our heads with us.”

Morrow recalled Perpetuation’s expression, as she had systematically shut out the existence of the forest folk. Maybe, he thought grimly, this was going to be even harder than he’d anticipated.

Lieserl remembered the first time she’d lost contact with the outside human worlds altogether. It had hurt her more than she’d expected.

She’d tested her systems; the telemetry link was still functioning, but input from the far end had simply ceased — quite abruptly, without warning.

Confused, baffled, resentful, she had withdrawn into herself for a while. If the humans who had engineered her, and dumped her into this alien place, had now decided to abandon her — well, so would she them…

Then, when she calmed down a little, she tried to figure out why the link had been broken.

From the clues provided by Michael Poole’s quixotic wormhole flight into the future, Superet had put together a sketchy chronology of man’s future history. Lieserl mapped her internal clocks against the Superet chronology.

When she first lost contact, already millennia had passed since her downloading into the Sun.

Earth was occupied, she’d found.

Humans had diffused out beyond the Solar System in their bulky, ponderous slower-than-light GUTships. It had been a time of optimism, of hope, of expansion into an unlimited future.

Then the first extra-Solar intelligence had been encountered, somewhere among the stars: the Squeem, a race of group-mind entities with a wide network of trading colonies.

Impossibly rapidly, the Squeem had overwhelmed human military capabilities and occupied Earth. The systematic exploitation of Solar resources — for the benefit of an alien power — was begun.

Sometimes, Lieserl speculated about why the dire warnings of Superet — based on Poole’s data — had failed to avert the very catastrophes, like the Squeem occupation, that Superet had predicted. Maybe there was an inevitability to history — maybe it simply wasn’t possible to avert the tide of events, no matter how disastrous.

But Lieserl couldn’t accept such a fatalistic view.

Probably the simple truth was that — by the time enough centuries had passed for the predictions of Superet to come true — those predictions simply weren’t accepted any more. The people who had actually encountered the Squeem must have been pioneers — traders, builders of new worlds. To them. Earth and its environs had been a remote legend. If they’d ever even heard of Superet, it would have been dismissed as a remote fringe group clinging fanatically to shards of dire prediction from the past, with no greater significance than astrologers or soothsayers.

But, Lieserl realized, Superet’s predictions had actually been right.

After the Squeem interregnum, contact with her had suddenly been restored.

She remembered how words and images had suddenly come pouring once more through the revived telemetry links. At first she had been terrified by this sudden irruption into her cetacean drifting through the Sun’s heart.

Her new capcom — ragged, undernourished, but endlessly enthusiastic — told her that the yoke of the Squeem had been cast off. Humans were free again, able to exploit themselves and their own resources as they saw fit. Not only that, Lieserl learned, the Squeem occupation had left humans with a legacy of high technology — a hyperdrive, a faster-than-light means of traveling between the stars.

Hyperdrive technology hadn’t originated with the Squeem, it was learned rapidly. They had acquired it from some other species, by fair means or foul; just as humanity had now “inherited” it.

The true progenitors, of much of the technology in the Galaxy, were known… at least from afar.

Xeelee.

The lost human colonies on the nearby stars were contacted and revitalized, and a new, explosive wave of expansion began, powered by the hyperdrive. Humans spread like an infection across the Galaxy, vigorous, optimistic once more.

Lieserl, drifting through her fantasy of Sun-clouds, watched all this from afar, bemused. Contact with her was maintained only fitfully; Lieserl with her wormhole technology was a relic — a bizarre artifact from the past, drifting slowly to some forgotten goal inside the Sun.

In the first few years after the overthrow of the Squeem, humans had prospered flourished, expanded. But Lieserl grew increasingly depressed as she fast forwarded through human history. The Universe beyond the Solar System seemed to be a place full of petty, uncreative races endlessly competing for Xeelee scraps. But maybe, she thought sourly, that made it a good arena for mankind.

Then — devastatingly — a war was fought, and lost, with another alien power: the Qax.

Earth was occupied again.

There were more birds joining the flock than leaving it, she realized slowly.

The birds joining the cloud came in from random directions. But there was a pattern to the paths of the departing birds: there was a steady flow of the outgoing birds in one direction, in the Sun’s equatorial plane, to some unknown destination.

The point was, more birds were arriving than departing. The cloud at the heart of the Sun was being grown. The birds were expanding the cloud deliberately.

She felt as if she were being dragged along a deductive chain, reluctantly, to a place she didn’t want to go. She found, absurdly, that she liked the birds; she didn’t want to think ill of them.