This was the perfect place to try to capture a kami— but not right now. Michael's mouth was dry and his heart was thudding painfully in his chest.

As the mesobot approached the window, the opening took on more definition, despite being farther away from Michael than his own indistinct, overlapping hands. Since vision in his neighborhood was deteriorating, he swam in that direction.

"It opens up just past the entrance," said Herat. "I see… looks like a swimming pool."

"Maybe you should go topside, sir," said the marine.

"I'm not hallucinating, man— I'm looking at a wide, long chamber with a low roof— maybe a meter high. The sonar hits a kind of boundary layer at the bottom and under that it's like another chamber. I'm going in."

"No! Sir—" Herat disappeared into the opening. The marine followed.

There was some scuffling and a sharp exchange of words. Then Herat and the marine emerged.

"It's water!" Herat had forgotten his anger immediately in the light of a new discovery. "There's long tanks of water in there. We're at about the one gee level here; you could swim in there and just sort of glide into the water. Maybe that's where they slept— the equivalent of living quarters. We have to do a thorough investigation—"

"Not before we've secured the approach, sir." The marine waved at the vaults below them. "I suggest we see what's down there before we proceed. And then, only with Admiral Crisler's permission."

"We don't need Crisler's permission," scoffed Herat. "Only Ms. Cassels's."

"He's right," said Rue. "It's my ship."

"You are correct," said the marine. "The ship is your responsibility. However, your safety aboard said ship is our responsibility. We are not threatening your ownership, merely doing our duty to protect you."

"We'll see about that," said Rue.

"Meanwhile," said Dr. Herat, "let's take this young man's suggestion and explore under the arches. Shall we?"

They backed the fish out of the opening and began to lower it and the others. Michael let out his line and drifted down after, with Herat behind him and the marine above.

The pools of water had sparked his imagination. This environment was alien, but something Herat had said last night came back to him: "What we will share most fundamentally with aliens will not be mathematics, or reason, or language, but basic bodily functions. If we're going to commune with them, it will be on that basis first and the others later or not at all."

Indeed, the slope of these arches told him nothing— they were geometrically minimal structures and any cellular automata program could have evolved their design. No, what made this place make sense was the image of someone coming home after a hard day's work in an uncomfortable medium and slipping gratefully into real water for a rest.

He knew he was half-consciously building the empathic basis for a NeoShinto revelation. A few months ago that would have pleased him; now he saw it as making himself vulnerable to a frightening truth he didn't want to see; he angrily shrugged off the feeling.

They dropped past the top of one of the arches and for the first time the rest of the spherical habitat became visible.

"It's a town!" Herat laughed. "An underwater town!"

"Beware the metaphor, Professor," muttered Michael.

It did look kind of like a mountain village back home, though. Farthest away was a smoothly curved latticelike structure suggesting boxes or buildings that rose up from the valley at the equator of the sphere toward its rotational pole. The boxes had openings on all sides, even the roofs. Inside, the sonar presented various complex shapes as multicolored blurs.

The middle distance was cluttered by a number of closed spherical structures atop tall pillars. Some of these had closed tubes or ducts that angled up and away to merge into the distant walls.

Michael looked up. The arches made a vaulted ceiling just above his head. Above that, he knew, were the tanks of water Herat had spotted, then the axis where Rue and the others waited. If those tanks were the living quarters, then what they were now seeing was where the creators of this habitat spent their days.

Something about the tanks seemed out of place. After a moment, he had it: "Professor, if the bottom of this place is at two gees of gravity, why did they put the water tanks at one gee if two was their natural gravity level?"

"Hell, I don't know. Comfort? Low-gee for sleeping? Hmm— urmm."

"By rights then we should find some more water at the very bottom, for a normal homeworld environment." He looked down; the sonar didn't show the sort of boundary layer there that Herat had described— only a jumbled blur.

"Why don't you swim down and take a look?"

"Yeah. Give me one of the fish." A shimmering, shape-shifting form drifted in his direction: the metal mesobot fish, viewed with sonar.

He switched from the inscape view for a moment: It was completely dark here now. The sensation of being flipped over slowly— an artifact of the habitat's rotation— was all he could feel. Best not to think about that; he returned to the inscape view.

Michael dropped a few meters and began to notice a change in the feel of the aerogel liquid. It was thicker, more viscous. Probably the little spheres were more tightly packed down here— something that didn't happen with water, which was essentially incompressible. He was just wondering whether it might harden into a solid mass at a certain level, when something caught his eye. He felt a flood of adrenaline hit him even as he realized what he was seeing.

"Shit! There's a fan down here. It's a big-bladed thing, on its back. It's turning at a few RPM; I don't know if it's pulling or blowing."

He had his answer a second later, as the mesobot fish passed him on the left and began arcing slowly down in the direction of the fan.

"Professor! The combination of the fan and higher gravity's pulling us down! Grab my line."

The fish turned around and began undulating, trying to escape the pull of the fan. For a few seconds it stayed suspended above the blades, which in sonar-light looked more like pyramids or blocks, their undersides shadowed solid.

"Bequith, your line's played out and fallen down behind you. We're getting them to reel it in from above."

He looked around. The line, visible as a kind of wing behind him, was indeed draped down into the blur below. He could see the vague other end of it lifting up past the arches, but too slowly. He was directly over the fan now.

He looked down and saw a Dalíesque fan blade swinging out to touch his line, just as the mesobot fish lost its fight to climb and fell among the blades.

Instantly everything blurred; he heard a loud clang through the aerogel. Then something had hold of his line and was pulling him down.

Yelling, he clawed at the safety clip on his belt. Precious seconds were lost as he fumbled at it; all he could see were vague looming shapes surging by under his feet.

He found the quick-release and pushed it. The line jerked away and then Michael was sucked down by turbulence. Something struck him hard in the stomach. He fell, landed hard and rolled, hammering his head against the inside of the helmet.

MICHAEL KNEW EXACTLY where he was and what had just happened, but he wasn't sure whether he had been lying here on his back for a few seconds or an hour. It was completely dark and silent. The darkness made sense; the silence didn't.

"Dr. Herat?" There was no answer. He called up inscape; a flood of diagnostic windows opened like flowers all around him. Since they were artifacts painted on his sensorium by nerve implants, their light didn't make him wince, nor did it illuminate the darkness beyond his helmet visor.

The diagnostics were clear, though: He had been here about ten minutes and still had almost a day's worth of air left in the suit's recycler. The suit's comm unit was damaged, however.