Another conduit ends with ice.

Inside an insulated cylinder, feeling a sudden cold and the pressure of more water plunging in from behind, the river freezes. Its flow slows, if not entirely stopping. Machines inject stones and clods of earth into the pure ice, making it look and taste like a well-fed glacier. Then the ice bursts out of the cylinder and into a little valley that feeds down into a cold turquoise sea.

The Yawkleen swim in their sea. They are cetaceans with many eyes and armed symbionts rooted into their long, muscular backs, and they live in small schools that eat the krill-like swarms that thrive in the cold brackish water. The sky of their youth hangs overhead, vast and blue and centered upon a giant jovian world and a multitude of sister moons. Engineers have found ways to mimic the giant tides of their home sea. Waves push into the glacial valley, lifting the tongue of ice until it shatters and begins to float, then the waves retreat again, exposing a hundred meters of black rock and tough seaweeds and crablike creatures as big as rooms.

Tourists sit in a sturdy boat, watching the tide fall.

Watching the Yawkleen.

They are humans, and very wealthy humans at that. The men are beautiful, but the women are always just a little more beautiful, and everyone speaks in clear, almost operatic voices.

“Lovely,” they sing.

“Closer,” they urge their boat.

The boat follows the pointing arms, moving toward the bluish island of ice. Four-winged birds rest on the ice, watching the intruders without interest. Then comes a sound more felt than heard—a staggering roar born somewhere beneath the surface—and the island shatters into unequal pieces, the smaller portion spilling over suddenly, throwing the birds into the sea.

A big Yawkleen rises to the surface, symbiotic arms grabbing the struggling creatures.

The humans applaud heartily

With a few kicks of the great vertical tail, the alien closes on them. Hands hold out the strangled prey. A series of squeaks are translated by the boat’s pilot. “Tell me what is new and fun,” the creature demands.

“New and fun where?” the humans ask.

“New to see. Fun to do.” A cackling laugh obscures the sound of water and the surviving birds. “I’m a traveler. I like to see, to do.”

There were always corners in the ship to explore. The humans mention a dozen new must-see destinations before the Yawkleen announces, “I have been to all of them. They bore me.”

The rebuke embarrasses and enrages.

Finally one beautiful man asks, “Well, where would you suggest we go?”

“The hull,” says the alien.

That the Yawkleen can travel up there is not news. There are limits on their mobility, yes. But inside a sealed vessel of native water, carried by machines that are powerful and proven … any passenger can be dragged to the surface and carried about …

“To see the Inkwell,” the alien prompts. “Haven’t you yet been there?”

“To the trailing hemisphere,” a pretty woman declares, an elegant hand scratching the gap between her lovely and very cold breasts. “I was up there just three years ago, for an entire day—”

“No, the lead hemisphere,” the Yawkleen urges. “That is a view worth the trouble. The shields. The lasers firing. And sometimes, if you’re as lucky as me, a chunk of something will slip past and strike on the horizon.”

Few tours visit the leading face. There are reasons of security, and at least as important, reasons of fear. What if just that sort of accident let a piece of ice strike you on the head? Risk was fun, but only so far as you weren’t in real danger.

“The Satin Sack,” says the alien.

The humans are tiring of this Yawkleen.

“If you considered the Inkwell as being black … well, you should see the Satin Sack. As if plunging into the deepest coldest sea, we are.”

“Where do you want to go next?” a man asks the lovely-breasted woman.

“Home,” she decides.

The boat complies instantly.

“Look at the Sack and try not be changed,” the cetacean shouts to the fleeing humans. “Think of what it means. Think of the dangers there. Your little brains need to feel more little, if you ask me … !”

The sea lifts with the tides and spills over a brink, falling now.

It is cleaned of wastes and salts, and falls on.

Then it is a river again, plunging down a steeply tilted cylinder. More thousands of kilometers have to be fallen through before the final bottom, and then the great pumps will grab the water, lifting it and dividing it into a myriad of springs and grand rivers and trickles and warm rains. But here, where the long flow has still barely begun, many thousands live and make their livelihoods. Odd fish dart about within a river that tumbles at a forty-five-degree tilt. Terraces and airborne reefs have built patches of flat ground where shops thrive, catering to the locals and the occasional visitor. The neighborhood is mixed in terms of species and wealth. It is newer than most neighborhoods but still a hundred centuries old. Everyone knows everyone. Humans are rare but generally respected. And an AI can sell flavored and tailored waters to a wide array of clients.

In the midst of a quiet night, an alien enters the shop.

“What may I do for you?” the shopkeeper inquires.

Only then does she look up, spying a creature that is not quite familiar. What precise kind of organism are you?

But the question is lost somewhere inside the swift tiny mind.

“Water,” the alien requests.

“Of course. But what precise type, my sir?”

“Pure,” says the client. “Absolutely pure.”

An easy enough task. The machine fills what seems like an appropriate container, and after watching it sit untouched between them, a feeling takes hold of her.

“It is all a mess,” says the alien.

She knows what is a mess. She feels it deeply.

“The captains are fools.”

With conviction, the shopkeeper agrees. “The future certainly looks awful.”

Then the alien seems to laugh at her. “No, the future looks wonderful,” it declares. Then it adds, “Forget that I said those words.”

The shopkeeper sits quietly waiting for something to happen.

She is alone, entirely by herself, listening hard for no good reason, and except for the endless sound of water plunging past her front door, she hears nothing worthy of a name.

Eighteen

One of her early husbands was a great mathematician and cosmologist—a little Tilan man who brought his relentless genius to every morning table. He would drink strong tea, salted and chilled, and eat nuts dipped in cold sweet oil, and with a voice that struggled to remain patient, he would again try to explain the universe to his old and very foolish wife.

“If nothing else, the equations with which I work are beautiful,” he maintained. “Before all else, they must possess elegance and a graceful balance, and they are always honest. They have no choice but to remain true to their nature. Do you understand, Mere?”

“Honesty,” she would repeat, her human mouth wrapped around the alien sounds. Then for herself, she said, “They are faithful.”

“Faithful to themselves,” he added.

“Of course.”

Tilans were tiny bipeds. Even Mere’s stunted body dwarfed most of the species. But luck and natural selection had given that species swift, acrobatic minds. Their neurons were formed from intricate tangles of proteinaceous crystals. Buried inside each neuron were forests of long, slender tubules—features narrow enough to feel the fuzzy borders of time and space. The Tila thought rather like a quantum computer thinks. Most sentient organisms could manage that trick on occasion, intuition and inspiration springing from the tiniest possible events. But for the Tila, intuition was the relentless heart of all life. Every conscious moment was dripping with the sense that the universe was ultimately and tirelessly vague. A trillion other universes, each as vital and real as their own, lay closer than the width of a busy electron. They felt it from their birth to their inevitable death, and like all natural philosophers, death was many things to them other than the end.