Confusion grabbed O’Layle. He opened his mouth, closed it, and then with a wounded sound, he asked, “Like that? You want me to abandon you?”

“Or remain with me,” he was told. “A world has its own will, and if you don’t wish to leave, you may remain here.”

O’Layle seemed eager to believe the invitation; he was desperate to feel pleased by the invitation, no matter how weak it sounded. But some force or half-born intuition kept him from celebrating. “I miss people,” he sputtered. “That’s all I meant to say. I thought maybe our new friends and I could wait here for a few years … until the Great Ship was past us, maybe … and then they could go out and catch their home after it clears the nebula …”

He paused, finally noticing that something was wrong now.

“What?” he whispered. “Is it … getting darker … ?”

Pamir had been watching the sky for the last few moments. Yes, the blue-white lights were dimming. Already the shadows were softening, a newborn gloom beginning to hide the endless stalk and all those crouching legs that led off into the jungle.

“What’s happening?” O’Layle demanded. Then with a foolish hope, he asked, “Is something wrong with the light?”

The black eyes stared only at Pamir.

“The light,” the Blue World answered. “The light was an indulgence meant for human eyes. But this world prefers to use her energies in more appropriate tasks.”

They were already halfway to night.

“What about my home—?” O’Layle began.

“It has been dark since you left,” the voice reported.

“And your structure has been absorbed and remade:”

O’Layle rose on trembling legs. “But,” he muttered. Then with the pain of someone who was losing the love of his life, he moaned, the sound inadequate and lost and almost too soft to hear. “This isn’t fair. I don’t want this:’

Pamir rose, and everyone but the world did as he did.

“To the shuttle,” he ordered.

But then he stood his ground, watching the girl-shaped bag of water and salt.

Perri leaned toward O’Layle. “Stay if you want,” he whispered. Then with a teasing menace, he asked, “How long can you tread water?”

The man nearly struck him.

It was Quee Lee who took O’Layle by the shoulder, and with a patient and halfway-understanding voice said, “I know. But really, you should remember that you’re alive and have this choice. Hmm?”

The man nodded weakly, retreating with the others now.

For the second time in his life, he was willingly abandoning his home in order to save his tiny soul.

Pamir continued to stare at the entity before him. The world sat with its long legs crossed, a bright little smile hinting at an array of emotions, none of which were likely or valid. “You took a little slice from each of us, didn’t you? With the touch. Those fingers. You scraped off some of our dead skin.”

“To know you better, yes. I have sent the tastes back to what passes, I suppose, for my mouth.”

“That’s how polyponds operate? When you meet one another—?”

“A sharing of self is essential. Yes.”

“Okay.” For a moment, he imagined his genetics being consumed and disassembled. Then he swallowed his disgust, remarking, “I should get a little taste of you, too. If I understand this ritual.”

“Naturally.”

From beneath the white gown, one of the hands withdrew what seemed to be a hunter’s knife, and with a smoothness of purpose that couldn’t help but unnerve Pamir, the other girlish hand yanked at the stalk, giving it enough slack for the knife to cut through in a single motion, a clean wet hissing accompanying the surgery as the heated steel blade cauterized the wound.

With a slight tremor, this tiny piece of the world stood.

A deep perfect darkness had fallen around them. Only the glow leaking from inside the shuttle showed them where to step. A few moments later, a deep roar began in the distance, in every direction, and grew swiftly into a thunderous mayhem. The jungle was being destroyed. Absorbed. Digested. The Gaian was beginning to clean away what for it was nothing but an elaborate but odd scab on its otherwise unblemished flesh.

“Pamir,” said the figure beside him.

“Who are you now? The world still?”

“When your skin cells are taken, do they remain part of you?”

“You’re separate now,” he surmised.

She said, “Entirely. Yes.”

“Are you a new world then?”

“Again,” she said. “When a cell of yours leaves your body, is it another you?”

“Not really.”

“Not really,” she repeated.

“But it might be, treated in the right ways. If it was allowed to grow.”

“Creation,” she said with a warm and fond and very much spellbound voice. “It is an endless, wondrous process. Creation is.”

They had reached the base of the shuttle. Behind them, the towering greeters began to tilt and fall, crashing onto the bare metal, bones shattering and their flesh splitting wide, the sound of black fluids gushing an instant before a thousand new mouths began to suck and chew, pulling this wealth of organics back into stomachs of every sort. Pamir watched. With the dim glow of the shuttle, he could just make out hills of meat and spent plumage quickly collapsing, everything about this show impressive—which was precisely as it was intended to be.

“Creation,” said the creature beside him.

He started up into shuttle, remarking with more warmth than necessary, “I’m sorry. But we don’t have room for two new bodies. If you come home with us, we’ll have to freeze you inside one of the hydrogen tanks.”

“Of course,” she said.

She didn’t ask about O’Layle’s fate, or lack thereof.

Then with a slow, careful voice, she admitted, “The guest of mine, this O’Layle, mentioned that your Great Ship carries a rather special cargo.”

Pamir said nothing.

“Or a passenger, perhaps. Very old and kept safe at the core.”

The continent shivered beneath them, individual masses of spongework being ripped apart at the seams.

“Very old,” she repeated.

“We don’t understand what’s down there,” he admitted. “But in our communications, I’m sure the Master Captain explained everything that we do know.”

The only light in the world was inside the shuttle. Washing across her face, it made her look simple and entranced, happier than perhaps any organism had ever been. O’Layle was somewhere above, still sobbing. Otherwise, it felt as if they were stepping inside an empty vessel.

“A prisoner,” she mentioned. “That’s what some call it.”

Pamir said nothing.

“Ancient as the universe,” she exclaimed. “Or more so.”

The world beneath him continued to tremble. Beside him, thousands of tons of freshly killed flesh were being eaten whole. A sad little man was weeping over the loss of his vast lover, and meanwhile the Great Ship was plunging headlong into a black nebula populated with a multitude of very peculiar souls.

The dread was real and abusive. But try as he might, Pamir couldn’t decide which of those problems had the strongest, most dangerous grip.

Sixteen

In distance and time, the voyage home was relatively brief. The Great Ship had continued plunging toward the Inkwell, and now the streakship was maintaining a collision course, obliterating much of its fresh hydrogen to return at better than half lightspeed. The return voyage would take years less than the first leg, and everything about everything was familiar now. But time is a slippery business to any mind, and space is always incalculably, numbingly vast. With their central mission finished, there was little to do but think about old haunts and avenues, friends and left-behind lovers. Reports continued to be filed, but since they were crossing old terrain, new information was rare and without any obvious importance. The mission itself had been a considerable success: Messages of congratulations continued to arrive from the Master and her various officers. They had spent only hours with a single polypond, but the event … meeting or ceremony or whatever this business had been … was deemed an official success. No tragedies had befallen their mission. A polypond representative was sleeping peacefully inside an auxiliary fuel tank, its makeup and frozen mind constantly studied by dozens of eyes wielding every available tool. The aliens had equaled or exceeded every promise of support. Retracing its original course, the streakship discovered that its path was growing cleaner by the day, the polyponds’ electrostatic charges and the streakship’s own lasers shepherding the debris off toward the edges. If the Great Ship’s course proved equally well scrubbed, then cutting through the Inkwell would prove easy to the brink of boring. Where was the bad news in any of that?