Farr said, “We can’t escape that. Can we, Dura?”

There was a moment of stillness, almost of calm. Farr’s voice, though still cracked by adolescence, had sounded suddenly full of a premature wisdom. It was some comfort that Dura wasn’t going to have to lie to him.

“No,” she said. “We’ve been too slow. I think it’s going to hit the Net.” She felt distant from the danger around her, as if she were recalling events from long ago, far away.

Even as it rushed up toward them the ripple bowed away from the trend of the vortex line in ever more elaborate, fantastic shapes. It was as if some elastic limit had been passed and the vortex line, under intolerable strain, was yielding.

It was almost beautiful, captivating to watch. And it was only mansheights away.

She heard the thin voice of old Adda, from somewhere on the other side of the Net. “Get away from the Net. Oh, get away from the Net!”

“Do as he says. Come on.”

The boy slowly lifted his head; he still clung to the rope, and his eyes were empty, as if beyond fear or wonder. She drove a fist into one of his hands. “Come on!”

The boy cried out and withdrew his hands and legs from the Net, staring at her with a round face full of betrayal… but a face that looked once more like that of an alert child rather than a bemused, petrified adult. Dura grabbed his hand. “Farr, you have to Wave as you’ve never Waved before. Hold my hand; we’ll stay together…”

With a thrust of her legs she pushed away. For the first moments she seemed to be dragging Farr behind her; but soon his body was Waving in synchronization with hers, wriggling against the cloying thickness of the Magfield, and the two of them hurried away from the doomed Net.

As she Waved, gasping, Dura looked back. The spin instability, recoiling, wafted through the Air like a deadly, blue-white wand. It scythed toward the Net with its cargo of wriggling humans. It was like some wonderful toy, Dura thought; it glowed intensely brightly, and the heat-noise it emitted was a roar, almost drowning out thought itself. The bleating of trapped Air-pigs was cold-thin, and Dura thought briefly of the old animal with whom she had shared that brief, odd moment of half-communication; she wondered how much that poor creature understood of what was to happen.

Maybe half the Human Beings had heeded Adda’s advice to get away. The rest, apparently paralyzed by fear and awe, still clung to the Net. The pregnant Dia was lumbering away into the Air with Mur; the woman Philas still picked frantically, uselessly, at the Net, despite the pleas of her husband Esk to come away. It was as if, Dura thought, Philas imagined that the work was a magic spell which would drive the instability away.

Dura knew that rotation instabilities lost energy rapidly. Soon, very soon, this fantastic demon would wither to nothing, leaving the Air calm and empty once more. And, glowing, roaring, stinking of sour photons, the instability was indeed visibly shrinking as it bore down on the Net.

But, it was immediately obvious, not shrinking fast enough…

With a heat-wail like a thousand voices the instability tore into the Net.

It was like a fist driving into cloth.

The Air inside the Net ceased to be superfluid and became a stiff, turbulent mass, whipping and whorling around the vortex instability like some demented animal. Dura saw knots burst open; the Net, almost gracefully, disintegrated into fragments of rope, into rough mats to which adults and children clung.

The Air-pig herd was hurled away into the Air as if scattered by a giant hand. Dura could see how some of the beasts, evidently dead or dying, hung where they were thrown, limply suspended against the Magfield; the rest squirted away through the Air, their bellow-guts puffing out farts of blue gas.

One man, clinging alone to a raft of rope, was sucked toward the instability itself.

It was too far away to be sure, but Dura thought she recognized Esk. Dozens of mansheights from the site of the Net, she was much too far away even to call to him — let alone to help — but nevertheless she seemed to see what followed as clearly as if she rode at her lost lover’s shoulder toward the deadly arch.

Esk, with his mat of rope, tumbled through the plane of the quivering, arch-shaped instability and was hurled around the arch itself, as limp as a doll. His trajectory rapidly lost energy and, unresisting, he spiraled inward, orbiting the arch like some demented Air-piglet.

Esk’s body burst open, the chest and abdominal cavities peeling back like opening eyes, the limbs coming free almost easily, like a toy’s.

Farr cried out, wordless. It was the first sound he’d made since they’d pushed away from the Net.

Dura reached for him and clutched his hand, hard. “Listen to me,” she shouted over the arch’s continuing heat-clamor. “It looked worse than it was. Esk was dead long before he hit the arch.” And that was true; as soon as he had entered the region in which superfluidity broke down, the processes of Esk’s body — his breathing, his circulatory system, his very muscles, all reliant on the exploitation of the Air’s superfluidity — would have collapsed. To Esk, as the strength left his limbs, as the Air coagulated in the superleak capillaries of his brain, it must have been like falling gently asleep.

She thought. She hoped.

The instability passed through the site of the Net and sailed on into the sky, continuing its futile mission toward the South. But even as Dura watched, the arch shape was dwindling, shrinking, its energy expended.

It left behind an encampment which had been torn apart as effectively as poor Esk’s body.

Dura pulled Farr closer to her, easily overcoming the gentle resistance of the Magfield, and stroked his hair. “Come on,” she said. “It’s over now. Let’s go back, and see what we can do.”

“No,” he said, clinging to his sister. “It’s never over. Is it, Dura?”

Little knots of people moved through the glistening, newly stable vortex lines, calling to each other. Dura Waved between the struggling groups, searching for Logue, or news of Logue; she kept a tight grip on Farr’s hand.

“Dura, help us! Oh, by the blood of the Xeelee, help us!”

The voice came to her from a dozen mansheights away; it was a man’s — thin, high and desperate. She turned in the Air, searching for its source.

Farr took her arm and pointed. “There. It’s Mur, over by that chunk of Net. See? And it looks as if he’s got Dia with him.”

Heavily pregnant Dia… Dura pulled at her brother’s hand and Waved rapidly through the Air.

Mur and Dia hung alone in the Air, naked and without tools. Mur was holding his wife’s shoulders and cradling her head. Dia was stretched out, her legs parting softly, her hands locked around the base of her distended belly.

Mur’s young face was hard, cold and determined; his eyes were pits of darkness as he peered at Dura and Farr. “It’s her time. She’s early, but the Glitch… You’ll have to help me.”

“All right.” Dura lifted Dia’s hands away from her belly, gently but firmly, and ran her fingers quickly over the uneven bulge. She could feel the baby’s limbs pushing feebly at the walls which still restrained it. The head was low, deep in the pelvis. “I think the head’s engaged,” she said. Dia’s young, thin face was fixed on hers, contorted with pain; Dura tried to smile at her. “It feels fine. A little while longer…”

Dia hissed, her face creased with pain, “Get on with it, damn you.”

“Yes.”

Dura looked around desperately; the Air around them was still empty, the nearest Human Beings dozens of mansheights away. They were on their own.

She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to resist the temptation to search the Air for Logue. She delved deep inside herself, looking for strength.