“And you were carried along for the ride.” The ancient face had a bright, almost boyish grin. “Remember that?”

Perri had ridden into this obscure cavern inside a cap-car, yes. He recalled racing through, trying to beat the Sword before it cut the cavern in two. At the end, what he wanted was to return to his wife, to hold Quee Lee once more before the polypond either won or lost. And this was the only possible route—a deep cavern, isolated and happy because of its isolation. Its twin rivers fed into a sea that drained nowhere but up, offering a thousand routes leading to the ship’s upper reaches. To Quee Lee’s front door, and home. But Perri had stopped for a few moments. Why? He had seen something, or something had seen him—

“We spoke,” he recalled. Dredging up pieces, he said, “I asked you about an alien.”

“You caught a whiff of something,” the worn face reminded him.

A biological cue, yes. An instrument riding on his car had inhaled a fleck of dust that triggered an alarm. Somewhere in the last one or two thousand years, a creature that may or may not have been an !eech had crossed this ground.

“You were looking for your bug,” the luddite said.

Perri nodded and weakly sat up.

“Whatever it was … you thought it might have climbed up that wall, into one of the Old Caves …”

“It hadn’t,” he replied. Then with a sad shake of the head, Perri added, “It was a spurious trace. My machine’s fault, and mine.”

“I don’t trust machines myself.” Something about that statement was terribly humorous. The old boy threw down his shovel and laughed for a long while, stopping only when Perri had recovered enough to stand on his own.

“The Sword’s already gone past,” Perri observed.

“While you were coming out of the Caves, yes.”

“Is that what started the avalanche?”

“Hardly.”

Off in the remote distance, the cavern came to an abrupt end. A strong glassy wall stood where there should be nothing but bright air and white clouds. The Sword’s fantastic motion and the wild energies had created an alloy of molten hyperfiber and gaseous rock. What remained could be kilometers thick, chaotic and impermeable and very tough. The new wall looked cold and rigid, but distances were misleading. Perri assumed that the Sword was now slicing into Marrow, reaching for whatever lay at its core, that irresistible marriage of purpose and fire carving out the heart of the ship.

“How long ago?” he asked.

“Did that machine pass?”

“A few minutes?”

Another laugh filled the air. “No, no. It’s been ages longer than that. You were dead ten different ways, and I found you and unburied you, and now I’ve been watching your goo turn back to fake flesh—”

“How long?”

“Thirty hours, nearly.”

Perri didn’t know what to say.

But his savior could guess the next questions. With a nod and a yellowy grin, he explained, “Someone managed to turn the Sword at the last moment. The captains, or somebody convinced that damned machine to twist sideways and miss the core, cutting its way out the trailing hemisphere and off into space somewhere. To die, we can hope.”

Washen had done it, thought Perri. Against very long odds, she had managed to save the Great Ship.

He said as much, almost cheering.

The luddite preferred amused silence.

For the first time, Perri tried to walk.

His savior watched him and smiled, and after Perri’s first careful steps, he asked, “Anything feel a little odd?”

“Everything does,” Perri replied.

Then he hesitated. “What am I supposed to feel?”

“‘Every man is as heavy as his burdens,’” the man sang out, quoting some old luddite text.

“What do you mean? My weight?” Perri bent his new knees and then stood again. Then he stared at jumbled rocks and the raw, exposed hillside, and with a building astonishment, he asked, “What triggered the avalanche?”

“The ship.”

“How?”

“Well, the whole great gal was moving.” The old face broke into a wild, raucous laugh. “Like never before, the ship shook and twisted, and quite a bit more than that, too …”

Perri considered the words.

“‘Every man is as heavy as his burdens,’” the man repeated. “After the shaking stopped, something about this world felt different, and I wanted to know what. may be a primitive man, but I’m not stupid. It only took me a full day and a hundred tests to decipher—”

“What’s changed?”

“Everything has grown heavier,” the luddite proclaimed “I’ve checked my conclusion on three scales, testing my own body as well as known masses. Over the course of the last thirty hours, I have become more robust by a little less than half a kilogram.”

“What do you mean?” Perri sputtered.

Then, “I don’t believe you.”

The luddite took no offense. With a shrug and a big wink, he simply said, “But that makes perfect sense. If this ship of ours is accelerating now.”

Accelerating how? The engines were dead, and the ship was sliced into two pieces, and Perri hadn’t heard so much as a hum out of any of his waiting nexuses since he came back to the living—

Oh, shit.

He dropped to his knees, as if struck in the belly.

“I’m not the oldest fellow in the world,” his companion admitted “And I’m not the brightest by a long ways. But judging by the evidence, I’d say … and with a certain amount of confidence … that after a very long sleep, the Great Ship has found her true engines, and she is once again, at long last, under way … !”

O’Layle sought her out, and with a mixture of astonishment and giddy pleasure, he reported, “The guards are talking about leaving. And they might leave the doors open for us, unless they do not. In either case, I think we can slip out before long.”

Mere nodded.

“You look well,” he lied.

She still had only a mortal body repaired in haste, and she remained far from healthy Rebuilding her immortal genes would take patience and talent, neither of which she had at her disposal just now.

“What’s wrong?” her companion inquired.

Mere stared at him with huge wise eyes.

“We weren’t obliterated by the polypond,” O’Layle reminded her. “We beat the creature in the end—”

“And she is sitting on our hull still.”

“And here we are, still completely alive. Which is why I don’t see the need for gloom.”

“The ship is accelerating,” she replied.

“Slowly” he countered.

But at a considerably faster rate than anything known before. Mere could have told him that much, and she could have spoken for days about the consequences of this one unexpected event. Even at their best, the Great Ship’s engines were weaklings next to this kind of energy production. But then again, maybe what they had always considered to be the engines were nothing more than maneuvering rockets. Had anyone ever bothered to wonder—?

“The ship still functions,” O’Layle continued. “We have good air and clean water, which is a testament to the machine’s capacity to endure.” Then he threw out his chest, adding, “We both know something about enduring, I think.”

Mere was weak. When she stood up, as she did now, she could feel the slight but insistent tug that was trying to pull her sideways. It occurred to her that this was as much acceleration as the ship could endure without disrupting lives and the flow of vital fluids. Gravity still dominated, but those inside the leading face would feel heavier than before. Those under the trailing face would feel lighter. And those like her, standing near one of the ports, would feel a delicate hand always shoving them sideways.