“Yes.” He opened his eyes, cautiously. The invisible engines of this bubble-pod hummed, almost silently, and below him the exit from the lifedome was a floor of gray emptiness, expanding toward him with exquisite slowness. “Yes, I’m all right. You startled me a bit, that’s all.”

“I’m not surprised.” The voice of the tall, dry man from the Decks — Morrow was rendered even more flat than usual by the distortions of the hidden communications devices. “Maybe we should have spent more time showing you what to expect.”

“Is there anything you want?”

“Yes, Spinner-of-Rope.” Arrow Maker felt small, fragile, isolated, like a child in a vehicle made for adults. All around him there was a sharp, empty smell: of plastic and metal, an absence of life. He longed for the rich humidity of the jungle. “I wish we could go home,” he told his daughter.

“For Life’s sake, stop this babbling.” The voice of Garry Uvarov was like a rattle of bone against glass. “Arrow Maker,” Uvarov said. “Where are you?”

Maker hesitated. The lifedome exit was huge beneath him now — he was so close to it, in fact, that its corners and edges were foreshortened; the semi-transparent surface of the lifedome turned into a rim of distant, star-spangled carpet around this immense cavity. He felt himself cringe. He reached out blindly for his bow and clutched it to his chest; it was a small token of normality in this world of strangeness. “I can’t be more than a dozen feet from the exit. And I — ”

The lip of the port, brightly lit, slid upwards around the pod, now; Arrow Maker felt as if he were being immersed in some bottomless pool.

When she understood the birds were trying to feed her, she tried to pick out individuals among the huge flocks. She told herself she wanted to study the birds: learn more of their lifecycle, mediated as it was by baryonic matter, and perhaps even try to become empathetic with the birds, to try to comprehend their individual and racial goals.

But making friends with photino birds — forming contact with individuals in anything like a conventional human sense — simply wasn’t a possibility for her, it emerged. They were so nearly alike — after all, she reflected, given their simple reproductive strategy the birds were very nearly clones of each other that it was all but impossible for her to tell them apart. And, on their brief orbits around the Sun, they flashed past her so quickly. She certainly couldn’t identify them closely enough to follow individuals through consecutive orbits past her.

So — though she was surrounded by the birds, and bathed in their strange, luminous generosity — Lieserl remained, still, fundamentally alone.

She felt intense disappointment at this. At first she told herself that this was a symptom of her limited understanding of the birds: Lieserl, as the frustrated scientist.

But this was just a rationalization, she knew.

She forced herself to be honest. What some part of her really wanted, deep down, was for the photino birds to accept her — if not as one of their own, then as a tolerable alien in their midst.

When she first diagnosed this about herself, she felt humiliated. For the first time she was glad there was nobody observing her, no latter-day equivalent of Kevan Scholes studying her telemetry and deducing her mental state. Was she really so pathetic, so internally weak, that she needed to cling to crumbs of friendship — even from these dark-matter creatures, whose alienness from her was so fundamental that it made the differences between humans and Qax look like close kinship?

Was she really so lonely?

The subsequent embarrassment and fit of self-loathing took a long time to fade.

Individual contact with the birds would be meaningless anyway. Since they were so alike, their behavior as individuals so undifferentiated, racial goals seemed far more important to the birds than individual goals. Personality was subsumed beneath the purpose of the species to a far greater extent than it ever had been with humans — even at the time of the Assimilation, she thought, when opposition to the Xeelee had emerged as a clear racial goal for humanity.

She watched the birds breed, endlessly, the swarms of clumsy young sweeping on uncontrolled elliptical orbits around the Sun’s core in pursuit of their parents.

The birds’ cloning mode of reproduction seemed to shape the course of their lives.

At first the cloning seemed restrictive — even claustrophobic. Racial goals, downloaded directly from the mother’s awareness into the young, overrode any individual ambitions. The young were robots, she decided, programmed from birth to fulfill the objectives of the species.

But then, so had she been programmed by her species — and so, to some extent, had every human who had ever lived, she thought. It was all a question of degree.

And anyway, would it really be so terrible, to be a photino bird?

With species-objective programming must come an immense fund of wisdom. The youngest photino bird would come to awareness with an expanded set of racial memories and drivers surely beyond the comprehension of any human.

Phillida had boasted that she — Lieserl — would become, with her close and accurate control of her memories and the functions of her mind, the most conscious human who had ever lived. Maybe that was once true. But, even at the height of her powers, Lieserl’s degree of awareness was surely a mere candle compared to the immense conscious power available to the humblest of the photino birds.

And perhaps, she thought wistfully, these birds were all components of some extended group-mind — perhaps to analyze the consciousness of any individual bird would be as meaningless as to study the awareness of a single component in her own processing banks, or one neuron in the brain of a conventional human.

Perhaps.

But that didn’t seem important to Lieserl, compared to the sense of belonging the birds must share.

Lieserl, the eternal outsider, watched the birds sweep past her in their lively, coordinated flights. She felt awe — and something else: envy.

She pulled away from the shrinking core of the Sun, out through the searing hydrogen-fusing shell, and soared up into the envelope — the bloated, gaseous mantle that the outer forty percent of giant-Sun’s mass had become. The envelope was a universe of thin gas — so thin, she imagined, that if she tried hard enough she could see out through these teeming layers, to the stars beyond (or what was left of them).

The Sun was a red giant. It had become a pocket cosmos in itself, with its own star — the hydrogen-fusion shell around the dead core — blazing at the center of this clogged, gas-filled space. But the outer layers, the mantle, had become so swollen that they utterly dwarfed the core. In fact, the dimensions of the Sun were like those of an atom, she realized, with the shrunken, blazing core occupying the same proportion of space within its mantle-cloud as did the nucleus of an atom within its cloud of electrons.

The photino birds clustered around the Sun’s shrinking heart, sipping relentlessly at its energy store. She was outside the bulk of the flock now although some outriders still swept past her, on their way into the flock from the Universe outside. With a new feeling of detachment, she started to experience a deepening sense of disquiet at the activities of the birds. From this perspective, the birds seemed like carrion, she thought, or tiny, malevolent parasites.

Restless, disturbed, Lieserl moved through the huge envelope. There was structure here, even in this immense volume, she saw. The photosphere of the new red giant — its huge, glowing surface — had actually become less opaque to radiation; its temperature had fallen so far that electrons had recombined with nuclei, increasing the transparency of the surface layers. So — even though its surface temperature had dropped — the Sun was actually radiating more energy, overall, than it had done before its swelling.