Martin could hardly see.

"Those who made the robots have all died. Their direct descendants long ago became part of larger forces you could not hope to understand. I am not one of the descendants; I, too, am a creation, but they have left us their history."

"History," Martin said. He raised an arm with great effort, pointed to the bishop vultures, sharks, and babar. "They think you created them."

"We did not create them. That is their chosen delusion, their faith." Pause. "You are in physical distress."

"Yes."

"What do you need?"

"Rest. Time to think. Sleep. Water."

That was all he could manage, and he felt shame at saying so much, at being so weak before his enemy.

"I will adjust your surround to make you lighter. Is that better?"

Martin seemed to float. Blood began to flow again, and he could see again, but his body still ached.

A fountain of water rose before him, and his suit leaned forward, dashing his face into it. Despite his apprehensions, he drank deeply. Strength seemed to radiate from his tongue and cheeks, from his throat.

"Better," he said.

"Can you listen now?"

"Yes."

"These representatives know a little, but for their sake, they do not know all. Are you a hunter?"

"Yes," Martin said, eyes fixing on the helix.

"You hunt to avenge the death of others?"

"My world."

"It was destroyed by robots?"

"Yes."

"We sympathize. Those who made us are distant descendants of those who made the machines that probably destroyed your world. But they are gone, enlarged. They have packed their minds into massless forms that will last beyond the end of the universe.

"They have left us here, greater than you, but still limited, because creating us pleased them. My kind live within this world, surviving in deep energy flows. I do not think there is time to explain our existence to you. We number in the tens of trillions.

"We did not make the machines that destroyed your world."

"The makers aren't here?" Martin asked.

"No. There are many more trillions of created intelligences in this system, none of them responsible for the destruction of your world."

Martin watched images of species upon species flash before him, stacking like cards, filling the tunnel; more forms than he could have ever imagined.

"Kill them, and you kill innocents. I am one."

The helix of light descended through the glimmer. The glimmer sank into the red circle. The red circle faded.

The others began to move again. Silken Parts' cords squirmed, grasped by his suit; only a few had fallen to the floor, where they curled like threatened millipedes. The bishop vultures swiveled their miters, eyes sinking and rising within their fleshy noses.

"You have been visited," Salamander said. "Who was chosen?"

The twenty gathered on the bridge of Double Seed, where Martin floated with eyes closed, still exhausted. Ariel and Paola squatted in mid-air nearby, sucking juice from squeeze bulbs.

The journey back had followed the same tortuous procedures, leaving Martin more confused, and finally angry at everything, a thick, clogging anger that seemed to reach back to the Ark and before, to Earth, to his childhood.

He had finished explaining what he had seen less than an hour before, and the twenty surrounded him in silence, as if in mourning.

Erin broke the hush. "You were the only one who saw… and heard."

"I we am embarrassed I did not maintain," Silken Parts said. "But I we saw the first appearance of the master."

"It wasn't the master," Martin said. "Or so it claims. Its kind may control the fourth planet… May control everything in this system. But it denies it is responsible for the killer probes."

"Did it say it would defend itself?" Cham asked.

Martin looked at him with a squint. "Against what?"

Cham rubbed his chin with his thumb. "If we carry out the Law."

"We didn't talk about it," Martin said.

Eye on Sky curled along a pipe like a snake around a tree limb. "The Law is not for taking lives of the uninvolved."

"You'd think they'd make the facts known to all of us," Cham said, looking at his thumb as if he may have rubbed away some dirt. "Why choose just two?"

"Serious disinterest, I'd say," Erin commented.

"Aloof," Donna added.

"Maybe we can't destroy them—the ones inside Sleep," George Dempsey said.

Eye on Sky spread his face cords and arched the upper part of his body to face Martin. "You as one are sure of what you gathered?"

"Are you positive you saw and heard correctly?" Paola interpreted.

Martin nodded. "No sham," he said. "It was as real as anything else we saw. It was real."

"But you were exhausted…" Cham said. "The others saw nothing."

" It feltlike super deceleration," Ariel said. She put her hand on Martin's shoulder, gripping it to keep from giving him a slight spin, and locked her foot under a brace. "I think Martin saw and heard what he's described."

Jennifer had kept silent since their return. Upside down to him, feet locked in ceiling grips, she folded her arms.

"Do we vote on it?" George Dempsey asked.

"No," Martin said. "When we can noach again, we tell our story to Hans and Stonemaker."

"We should go down again," Paola said, and bit her lower lip, looking around the group like a frightened deer. "We should try to talk again with… Martin's staircase gods, whatever they're called, inside Sleep. It's our duty."

"What are you going to recommend?" Ariel asked.

"I don't know," Martin said. "I need to sleep, or I'm going to be sick."

In his cabin, Martin slumbered in total darkness without dream or memory, a deathly bite of nothing. He awakened abruptly once, knew precisely where he was and what had happened, remembering all too easily—and closed his eyes again to return to nothing. He was not so exhausted now, however, and as he rotated within his net, pulling his arms in, he knew there was somebody else in the room with him.

For a moment he assumed it was that old companion of his sleeping existence, Theodore, but it was not. He smelled a living person, a woman.

"I didn't mean to wake you," Ariel said.

"I don't think you did."

"I was too tired to sleep. I came here. I've been listening to you breathing. It's like… When you breathe, it's like…"

He heard her neck bones quietly pop in the dark. She was shaking her head.

"Soothing," she finished. "Can I be in your net with you?"

"I'm still tired."

"I need to sleep, too," she said.

"All right." He opened the net and she pushed in beside him, an elbow in his ribs, her buttocks against his knees, and then they were parallel in the net and he could smell her more strongly. The sweet musty scent of her hair. He had never thought of Ariel as physically pleasant, but he found her so now. She did not move or speak. Finally her breathing smoothed and he listened to her sleeping. It was soothing, simple and basic and human, what someone might have experienced lying in bed next to a woman thousands of years ago, or nearly so: the hug of Earth subtracted.

She wore shorts and top of loose terry. He wore nothing. She had not come into his room to make love, but he knew she would not stop him if he chose to begin making love. The inevitability intrigued him.