He tried to sit up; his head spun and it felt like a great hand was trying to push him down again. He stood, slowly, and though movement was like pushing through a strong wind, he had no difficulty staying up. The worst part was the continuous spinning sensation, which he knew was real: It came from the habitat's rotational gravity.

From somewhere nearby a steady chop-chop sounded. That would be the fan. He could feel its effect, in regular pushes that almost made him stagger.

He was supposed to weigh twice his normal weight down here, but it didn't feel like it. Except for the thickness of the medium, it felt more like a standard gee. He could walk, or at least stagger under the strong coriolis effect and his feet touched down as fast as if he were standing in air on board the Banshee.

Of course. He bet that the creatures that built this place were more buoyant than a space-suited human. They probably couldn't sink in this aerogel and there would be a lower limit below which they couldn't swim— they'd just pop up again. What to him was a floor, would to them be as inaccessible as a distant ceiling.

By that logic, he would be standing in their machine attic. He might stumble into another fan in this blackness, or something worse.

But he couldn't just stand here. Or could he? They should be lowering the other mesobots more carefully even now and casting sonar illumination all through this area.

Wait a second— ten minutes? That was plenty of time for them to have illuminated the whole area and even brought down another diver and some safety line. Where was everybody?

Maybe he wasn't visible lying down. He tried waving his arms, after cautiously reaching out to make sure he wouldn't hit something. That should do the trick.

Michael stood there for a few minutes, waiting, while his head throbbed and he imagined all sorts of threats converging on him in the blackness. He waved his arms again and shouted, which was absurd since he just hurt his own ears.

Nobody answered. Nobody came.

After a while he decided he must have fallen in the sonar shadow of something big. He would have to walk. Arms out like a blind man, he shuffled forward. Almost immediately his fingers touched a solid wall.

He groped his way along it. It turned out to be a big metal box, just taller than he was. There was open space beyond it, but he only went a few meters before he encountered a low box with a grill; aerogel was surging up out of this, though not strongly enough to lift him. He skirted it and tripped over some cables. The weird combination of rotational gravity and viscous aerogel made him land on his face again.

Where were they? Michael ran through his entire repertoire of curses. His voice in his own ears sounded weak, boyish. He didn't want to die down here. Once he had believed death was merely a remerging with the universe. Now he saw that universe as vastly indifferent and himself as trivially small within it. To die was not to merge; it was simply to cease.

He forced himself to crawl, waving one hand ahead of him. And after a while, he began to see light ahead— at least, a change from total black to graphite gray.

They must be searching in the wrong place and they'd brought in floodlights to help…? No, that didn't make sense, this stuff wasn't transparent at any wavelength.

The light brightened and it became evident that it wasn't coming from above but from something on the deck ahead of him. Michael stood up cautiously and walked forward. His faceplate became gray, then white, then bright and milky. He put up his hand and saw it as a shadow. Following the shadow brought him to another collection of shadows, a sort of crosshatch pattern. Some bars with a bright light behind them? He reached out.

His hand fell on a pipe of some kind. Running his fingers along it, he discovered it ended in a vertical junction about half a meter to the right— and another, on the left. And above….

It was a ladder. They'd let down a ladder for him.

Michael laughed in huge relief and began to climb. This would be a story and a half, that was for sure. It was strange, though, how had they gotten a ladder in here in ten or fifteen minutes? He kept climbing, idly wondering at this, as the light fell away below him. No light emerged above.

He slowed his climb, then stopped. The ladder was a bit too steady under him to be something that had just been lowered from above. His people hadn't put this ladder here. It was part of the ship.

For a while he clung there in indecision, feeling his inner ear flip over and over from the habitat's rotation. He had to be visible on this thing. Nobody came, nothing happened, so he resumed his climb.

After a while he bumped his head and reaching up felt a smooth surface above him. A dead end? He felt about and his hand fell on an indentation, which had several knob-shaped things in it. He twisted one at random, then another, then reached up again.

His hand felt the surface again, but this time it was soft. He put his hand through it— this was an airlock like the one on the outside of the habitat. Eagerly, he pushed up through it— and into light.

"Gods and kami." He'd thought he must be back at the axis, but this was not the case. Instead, Michael found himself in a small round room with virulently green walls. Most of the floor space was taken up by the bulging round magnetic lock. The place was illuminated by, of all things, a sort of mirror-ball that hung in the center of the space. Four small spotlights spaced about the edges of the ceiling were aimed at it.

The room was a little more than a meter and a half tall. He had to crouch to stand.

A corridor led off from one side of the room. He hulked his way over to this; he seemed to weigh more than usual here, but not unduly much. The corridor sloped up steeply. It too was lit by little spots and mirrored pyramids set into the ceiling.

Michael checked his suit's readings. External air pressure: five bars, very high by human standards. Temperature: twenty-eight degrees Celsius. Humidity: forty percent. Atmospheric composition: ninety percent nitrogen, eight percent oxygen, two percent carbon dioxide. This might be breathable if you used CO2 scrubbers; he didn't know enough about partial pressures to be able to say for sure.

Well, there was only one way to go. Michael started climbing.

The corridor ran a long way. Somewhere around halfway up he realized that the round room must have been in one of those spheres they'd seen balanced halfway up the cathedral space of the habitat. This corridor would be in one of the ducts that had angled up from them to join with the habitat's outer skin.

The habitat was designed for two entirely different species to use together. Herat, were he here, would doubtless be chattering on about all that. For once, Michael was glad his boss wasn't around; it felt much better to be panicking by himself and not having to do it for two. Herat wouldn't even know he was in danger in a place like this.

Michael's weight fell rapidly as he climbed. Finally the low corridor ended at a T-intersection. He estimated he was at about the level of those tanks Herat had seen. He would have to get higher than this; if two species inhabited this place, there should be another entrance at the rotational axis. There wasn't one on the shore of Lake Flaccid, but hadn't Corinna said something about there being airlocks at both ends of the sphere? Maybe there was one for each species.

The corridor he was in now curved off in both directions. It might well circumnavigate the sphere. There were square doorways at regular intervals. He picked a direction at random and walked, glancing with some apprehension through the first several doorways before passing them.

The doorways led to rooms of various sizes. These were filled with… sheets. Each room held dozens of vertical rods, always in pairs, and between these were tautly strung thick sheets of some clothlike substance. They were usually about three meters wide and six to eight long and were fairly tightly packed in the vertical; he counted up to fifteen stacked above one another. They filled the rooms right up to the door; the only way to get in would be by burrowing through these layers and maybe that was the idea: He pictured some sort of social animal, molelike, used to burrowing and being surrounded by friends and family. Among the taut sheets he glimpsed folded frames of some kind, as well as stacks of complex metal items and what looked like plain old ordinary boxes.