“What was said?” he asked.

“I don’t know. We’ll ask her, as soon as we find her.”

The conversation paused. The Master fell into his own thoughts while the Happenstance continued threading its way through the lowest, thinnest reaches of the wilderness forest. Every leaf looked shriveled, spent. Skeletal branches wore silvery epiphytes that grew nowhere else. Birds were scarce and each bird had slits for eyes, and the insects wore mirrors on their shells. The sun was something to be endured. It scorched flesh and peeled bark, and the reflected glare made Diamond’s eyes ache even when covered with the goggles. Nobody else looked out the windows. But Diamond could stare into the distance, and the discomfort was bearable. He felt the fletch bleed gas and drop still lower. This big fine machine was nothing but a speck inside a great room filled with golden air, and all of the world’s trees were above them—a ceiling of burnt yellow and black-green that seemed small compared to this vastness of wind and light.

Far to his left, something moved.

Something fell.

A long slender shape was spinning, distance making it tiny. Diamond squinted and laid his hands under his eyes, fighting the glare. The object was a large branch or whole tree, something ripped free of the ceiling and plunging into places even brighter and hotter. The event was enormous and soundless, without any sense of violence. A tiny stick tumbled and grew tinier, and he watched the stick vanish, swallowed by the sun’s magnificent glare.

Then with a big jovial voice, the pilot shouted down from the cockpit. “Reef coming,” he said.

Diamond pressed his face into the window, looking ahead.

What was empty air just moments ago was changing. Emerging from brilliance was something dark, weightless and massive in the same glance. He couldn’t piece together details. He thought the object was just ahead, but distances confused him. Falling leaves and tumbling bugs and monkey poop and the endless drip of rainwater made for cluttered air, and rising sunlight made a mist from the falling debris, hiding what was too far or too small.

The dark object gradually spread sideways. A distinct line divided the mystery into a top and bottom. Below was bright blackness, like the glass in his goggles, and above it was a different species of darkness. Then Diamond closed his eyes and opened them, and that’s when he realized that the reef was like a shelf hung on a wall. The shelf blocked the light from below, and he was seeing shadow on top. With too many questions wanting to be asked, he did nothing but stare, the one side of his face pressed against rubber that was hot to touch and growing hotter.

And the Happenstance let out a huge blaring roar. Everyone in the cabin jumped. The Master laughed without really laughing, and with a fond slow voice said, “The Bright River station. We’re almost there.”

The ship passed over the shelf’s lip, and the sun softened. One moment the full glare of it was everywhere, and then the fringes of shadow washed over them. Seldom took his hands off his eyes, looking at Diamond before clamping them shut again. “He can see outside,” he told Elata.

“Of course he can,” said Elata, not bothering to look.

Again, the horn gave out its warning. Diamond couldn’t make sense of what was under him. Turquoise shades predominated, but there were odd greens and radiant blues and cold blues and golden splotches that refused to come into focus. This was a place visited in dreams, not in life. Pushing deeper into shadow that was still well-lit, the terrain turned into a series of mounds and holes and faces of exposed coral cliffs and stands of odd upright plants, nothing in this place resembling any of the wonders he had already seen today.

His friends dropped their hands and joined him, gazing out and down.

“And this is the reef’s wasteland,” Seldom said. “This coral is old, drained of its nutrients.”

On the poor ground beneath them was a big animal, thick and strong with long jaws and a fleshy sail down its back. Rising up on its hind legs, it greeted the ship with a solid, high-pitched wailing.

“A burnish-hound,” Seldom said.

The children pushed their shoulders against Diamond.

“Do you see any papio?” Elata asked.

Seldom looked everywhere, admitting, “I wish I did, but no.”

Elata shoved her face against the flexible window, pushing to look ahead, pushing as if she wanted to split the rubber and fall free. “I see the station,” she said. Then after a pause and one abrupt deep breath, she said, “Oh my, my! I think that’s . . . it is has to be . . . I can’t believe it . . . !”

“The papio?” Seldom asked.

“A corona,” she said.

“Dead?” he said.

She laughed. “If it was alive, I’d be screaming. Wouldn’t I?”

Horns sounded from below, modulated, rich with meaning. The Happenstance turned away from the corona. Diamond caught a glimpse of something long and pale, but then it vanished behind a tall knob of blue-green coral. The station was a sprawling, thinly populated collection of industrial buildings and bunkhouses, and on the outskirts were circles of ground stripped of foliage and roughly smoothed out, pylons standing in the middle of each circle, waiting for ships to be tied against them. A small busy man waved red flags, and the Happenstance paused above him, bleeding just enough hydrogen to begin a slow, graceful fall. Then a troop of capable monkeys galloped out of a bunkhouse, grabbing the lines cast off from the ship, and they climbed the pylon, each weaving its own slipknot before falling into boisterous arguments about which knot was best.

The pilot was first down the gangway, cursing to the one human about his miserable luck and his extraordinary good fortune. “That engine flew to pieces, but did we catch fire? Did we puncture? Did we fall into the sun? I don’t know whether to moan or cheer, so I’ll do both. How about that?”

The man with the flags nodded absently, watching three children and one older man approaching.

“Merit,” said Nissim. “We’re looking for him, sir. It’s very important.”

The man was short and strong and perhaps a little simple. But he liked being called, “Sir,” and talking about the famous corona hunter always brought a smile to his filthy, unshaven face.

“I don’t know where Merit is,” he said. “But steer for the carcass. The man brought us a half-giant this morning. A beauty. I’m sure he’s there now, kneeling in its shadow, begging for forgiveness.”

Everything was amazing, and Seldom laughed at everything. “Do you know who this fellow is? This is Merit’s son.”

The flag man was pleasant but not terribly impressed. “Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” he told Diamond. Then voicing some old, well-rehearsed joke, he added, “You certainly got lucky, my boy. You don’t look at all like your father.”

Seldom and the flag man laughed together, for different reasons.

Diamond’s head dipped and he walked on.

The Happenstance’s pilot remained behind, steering the conversation back to what mattered: the condition of his broken engine and how soon could he roundup the mechanics to help him and his crew make repairs.

The Master dropped his goggles down around his neck, and the others did what he did, following him along a broad trail covered with pulverized, closely packed coral. With a teacher’s voice, Nissim said, “The reef is rough and we don’t have adequate shoes. So walk the established paths. And please, whatever you do, stay close to me. This isn’t safe country for the prepared, and we aren’t even that.”

“I know,” Seldom said.

“We’ll be careful,” Elata said agreeably.

“And I have one command,” Nissim said. “From now on, nobody mentions fathers and sons. I think we need the habit of keeping certain kinds of knowledge private.”