"Alvin thought the Phylum Myriasoma was extinct," Seeker said. "He would be happy to see that he is wrong yet again."

             Cley smiled despite her tingling fear. "Supras don't like news like that."

             As she watched, the Captain's legs dissolved into a swarm of bits. Each was the size of a thumb and swam in the air with stubby wings. The Captain was an assembly that moved incessantly, each flyer brushing the other but capable of flitting away at any moment. The individual members looked like a bizarre mixture of bird and insect. Each had four eyes, two on opposite sides of their cylindrical bodies and one each at top and bottom.

             Cley heard the Captain then in her mind. Ihe thrumming whisper of wings she had heard was echoed by a soft flurry of thoughts in her mind.

             You are a danger to me.

             "You? The ship?"

             I am the world.

             And so it must seem to this thing, she reahzed. It somehow governed the immense complexity of the Leviathan and at some level must be the Leviathan, its mind instead of merely its brain. Yet each moment a flying thumb shot away on some mission and others came to merge into the standing, rippling cloud. Beneath its clear message she felt the buzzing of quicksilver thought, the infinitude of transactions the Leviathan must make to keep so vast an enterprise going. It was as though she could listen to the individual negotiations between her own blood cells and the walls of her veins, the acids of her stomach, the sour biles of her liver.

             Cley thought precisely, slowly. How can you be self-aware? You change all the time.

             The shape let its right arm fall off, scattering into clumps that then departed on new tasks. I do not need to feel myself intact, as you do.

             So how do I know who's talking? Cley countered.

             The Captain answered, I speak for the moment. A little while later I shall speak for that time.

             Cley glanced at Seeker but it was watching with only distant interest. She thought. Will that be the same you?

             How could you tell? Or I? I always find that your kind of intelligence is obsessed with knowing what you are.

             Cley smiled. Seems a reasonable question.

             Not reasonable. Reason cannot tell you deep things.

             Cley watched as the shape gradually decomposed into an oblong cloud of the thumb-things. It had made its polite gesture and now relaxed into a wobbly sphere, perhaps to bring its individual elements closer while lowering its surface area. Are you afraid of me? she asked impishly.

             My parts know fear. Hunger and desire, as well. They are a species, like you. But I am another kind of being, and can elude attack by dispersing. I do not know fear for myself but I do know caution. I cannot die but I can be hurt.

             Cley thought of the honeybees she had tended in the forest— satisfying, sweaty labor that now seemed to have happened a very long time ago. Bees had fewer than ten thousand neurons, she knew, yet did complex tasks. How much more intelligent would be a single arm of this cloud-Captain, when its thumb-things united to merge their minds?

             Not hurt by anybody like me, I assume?

             The swarm churned. Yes. I am not vulnerable to destruction of special parts, as are you. Merely by taking away your head, for example, I could leach life from you, rob you of all you know. But each part of me contains some of my intelligence and feels what a part of the world feels.

             Cley felt suddenly the strangeness of this thing hanging before her, bulging and working with sluggish patience as it pondered the Leviathan's intricacies. Another phylum? No, something more— another kingdom of life, a development beyond beings forever separated into inevitable loneliness. In a way she envied it. Each thumb-flyer knew the press of competition, of hunger and longing, but the composite would rise above that raw turbulence, into realms she could not even guess. She glanced at Seeker again and saw that its expression was not of indifference, but of reverence. Seeker had not wanted her to seek the Captain because it was, even for Seeker, a holy being.

             I speak to you now because the world cannot tolerate you, the Captain sent.

             How come you ran away before? Cley asked.

             I needed time to speak to my brothers.

             Other Leviathans? As she framed the thought the Captain's answer came: Other worlds.

             Was there something beyond Leviathans? Cley started to ask but the Captain said, I now understand many recent events and your connection with them. There is an entity called the Mad Mind and it searches for you.

             I know.

             Then know this —

             In a flooded single moment a torrent of sensations, ideas, and conclusions forked through her. She had for an instant the perception of what the mind before her was truly like. The layers of its logic were translucent, so that every fact shone through to illuminate the lacing of concepts on another level. And that light in turn refracted through the lattice of mind, shedding its fitful glow on assumptions lying beneath.

             This was thought without the constraint of the staged human brains. That a property had emerged in the billion years since the era of Ur-humans and now showed the limitations of evolution's blind methods. Rapid selection pressure operated on what already existed, adding capability to minds rather than snipping away parts which worked imperfectly. The human brain was always retrofitted, and showed its origins in its cumbersome workings. The Captain had arisen from a different mechanism.

             But this realization was only a filament tossing on the surge that swamped her. She sagged with the weight of what the Captain had given her, stunned as though by a blow. She was dimly conscious of Seeker leaping forward to cradle her. Then the air clouded with ebony striations and she felt herself dwindling beneath a great dark weight.

31

             "You can speak it?" Seeker asked, its tilted chin and rippling amber fur patterns showing concern.

             "I, I think so." Cley had slept for many hours. When she revived, Seeker had brought her a banquet of berries and fruits and thick, meaty leaves. Now she tried to explain what she had sensed in the brief collision of minds. Like Seranis, the Captain sent information faster and at greater depth than Cley could handle.

             "But didn't you feel it, too?" she asked.

             "I do not have your talent."

             "What did the Captain do after I fainted?"

             "Scattered like a bird swarm into which a hunter has fired a shot."

             "Huh. Maybe it didn't know how to tell me without overloading me.

             "Perhaps. I have seen Captains before. This was different. Ah—"

             Seeker snagged a ratlike creature which was passing and bit off its fat tail. The rat squealed and hissed and Seeker put it gently back down. As the rat scampered away Seeker munched on the tail. "A delicacy," it explained. "They grow tasty tails so that the rest of them is let go."

             "It'll live?"

             "Within days it will sport another luscious tail." Seeker smacked its lips at a morsel, holding out the last to Cley.

             "No rat's ass for me, thanks. You were saying something about the Captain?"