And it all went faster as the Storm came on, that is the Storm coming on was the race drawing to its end; the solutions grew stranger and more desperate, and the disasters greater, and in the teeth of them the angels dreamed their wildest dreams, that we would live forever or nearly, that we would leave the earth, the spoiled earth, entirely and float in cities suspended between the earth and the moon forever, a dream they could not achieve because of the Wars starting and the millions of them falling out in a million different ways and all at each other's throats. And the Long League growing secretly everywhere as the desperate solutions fell to ruins or exploded in the faces of their makers, the Long League in secret struggle with the angels, who hardly knew of its existence in their midst till the League was the only power left when the Law and the Gummint had exhausted themselves with the Wars and in the struggle to keep the world man's; and for that matter the truthful speakers beginning the speech over the thousand phones of the Co-op Great Belaire; and while the million lights were going out, and the mechanical dreams fading and leaving the angels alone in the terrible dark, the Planters, thousand-armed and -eyed and wiser than any human being, searched other skies and suns at the angel's bidding, and brought home the trees of bread and who knows what else now lost; and nobody able to comprehend everything going on all at once, and no wonder either; and then the Storm, as Seven Hands said, which anybody could have seen, and it all began to stop, and kept stopping till all those millions were standing in the old woodlands which they had never been in before and looking around in wonder at the old world as though it were as strange as their dreams had truly been.

Blink said: "It was as though a great sphere of many-colored glass had been floated above the world by the unimaginable effort and power of the angels, so beautiful and strange and so needful of service to keep afloat that for them there was nothing else, and the world was forgotten by them as they watched it float. Now the sphere is gone, smashed in the Storm, and we are left with the old world as it always was, save for a few wounds that can never be healed. But littered all around this old ordinary world, scattered through the years by that smashing, lost in the strangest places and put to the oddest uses, are bits and pieces of that great sphere; bits to hold up to the sun and look through and marvel at - but which can never be put back together again."

We lay stretched out in the late-summer yellow meadow and watched the solemn clouds go by. There had been a chill that dried out the woods and left them dusty and odorous, rustling and tinted brown, but summer kept on: engine summer.

"Blink," I said, "are there cities in the sky?"

He scratched behind his ear and settled back with his hands behind his head. "The angels' cities in the sky. That's what Little St. Roy called clouds like those. But there's a story. It's said that at the time of the Storm the angels built cities covered with domes of glass, which by some means could float like clouds. I don't know. I don't doubt they could. And they used to say that one day, after thousands of years perhaps, the angels would come back; the cities would land, and the angels would come out and see all that had been going on while they floated. Well. Hmmm… Nobody, no angel's returned… I don't know… Maybe they got it mixed up with Little Moon, which really was a city in the sky where angels did live, though all there are dead now, caught in the Storm they were with no way to get home - still there, I guess. Who knows? The milkweed's breaking, see there?"

The brown seed floated near him, which looked so much like him; I thought that if I could get close enough to it, it would have a long nose, little features, like Blink's. It rolled across his wrinkled white shirt and got off again, going elsewhere. The air would choose.

"Bits and pieces," Blink said sleepily. "Bits and pieces."

He slept. I watched the clouds, peopling their valleys and canyons with angels.

Fifth Facet

Bits and pieces: a silver ball and glove. An angel picture of St. Gary's Uncle Plunkett. A house in which two children and an old woman told about the weather, and the stone dead men in between. A false leg; a clear sphere with nothing at all inside it except all of Dr. Boots; a fly caught in plastic; a city in the sky. No, it can't be put back together, he was right about that, and I never wanted to put it back together; but it seemed that each of these things in turn gave me a message, a sign, pointed a finger toward the next, and that somehow, at the end of the series, I would find something precious which was lost - perhaps only knowledge, but something which I wanted above all else to find.

You have found it.

Have I? Who is this I? Didn't Mongolfier tell me that it wasn't I at all that would come here, that what would come here was no more than a reflection, an unvarnished dream, no more I than the angel picture of Uncle Plunkett, made by no human hand, was Plunkett himself? Then why do you say I have found anything at all?

Because no one else found the silver ball and glove - this silver ball and glove. No one else searched for it. No one else followed the series from beginning to end - and then took the last step. Perhaps anyone else could have - but no one did. So it is you that found us. You that I speak to now: you alone who speaks to me. Now: were you going to tell about Plunkett?

I… yes. Yes: I was going to tell how I saw the picture, and what Blink said… Do you know this story better than I do?

Go on. It's not for my sake you tell it.

I had asked Blink about the little house Once a Day showed me, and the four stone dead men. "I know about four stone heads," he said, "four heads that are a mountain; but they aren't the four dead men in the story I know. Perhaps the four stone heads picture the four dead men; or perhaps it's a joke of Whisper cord's. What was it she said of them? 'Are they mad.' Well. Who can follow Whisper? But there is a story:

"At the time of the Storm, when at last the lights and phones of the Co-op went off for good, and Great St. Roy led us away to wander, there was a boy, Gary, among us, who would become St. Gary. St. Gary had been raised by his aunt, who was a speaker, and by his uncle, who was named Plunkett. Plunkett's work, secret in nature, was one of those last plans of the angels spoiled by the Storm: a plan for immortality. The secret slipped out through Plunkett's wife, who revealed to Gary that although his uncle was dead and buried, which she didn't dispute, he was also alive in an underground place near Clevelen, far west, near the place the Co-op had been.

"So St. Gary turned back from the speaker's flight to return to Clevelen to see if he could find his supposed uncle still alive, though as he went west he passed the grave where he had seen his uncle laid. After a long search, Gary did find the place Plunkett's wife had told him of; and by that time so had others, some desperate to learn what the angels knew of immortality, others wishing to destroy the work as they were intent on destroying all that the angels had done.

"What they had found, and now kept constant watch over and had fierce disputes about, were five clear spheres without any openings and with, it appeared, nothing at all inside them. Attached to four of these five were angel-pictures, gray and shiny, of four faces. One of them was St. Gary's Uncle Plunkett.

"There was a lot of resistance among the others there to St. Gary taking his uncle away with him. For some time he argued with them, defending Plunkett from those who wanted to smash the spheres, if they were smashable, and from those who wanted to open them, or operate them, if that could be done. Then the Long League intervened there. Women of the League came, and said they would decide the matter - as they were just then deciding so many matters - and that no one should touch the spheres or investigate them further but they. St. Gary wouldn't agree; and by stealth one night he made away with the sphere that was in some sense Plunkett, and fled.