Ten Human Beings — Dura with Farr in tow, Adda, the newly widowed Philas, and six other adults — climbed out of the site of the devastated encampment. They Waved steadily across the Magfield and toward the Crust, in search of food.

Adda, as was his custom, stayed a small distance away from the rest as they Waved across the field-lines. One of his eyes was matted over with the scars of age — thinking about it now he gave that cup a quick poke with a fingertip to dislodge some of the less welcome little creatures who were continually trying to establish residence in there — but the other eye was as keen as it had ever been, and as he Waved he swept his gaze through the Air above, below and all around them. He liked to stay apart to keep an eye on things… and it allowed him to hide the fact that he sometimes had trouble keeping up with the rest. It was his boast that he could still Wave as good as any damn kid. It wasn’t true, of course, but it was his boast. He used to wriggle across the Magfield like an Air-piglet with a neutrino fount up its arse, he recalled wistfully, but that was a long time ago. Now he must look like a Xeelee’s grandmother. Adda’s vertebrae seemed to be seizing up one by damn one as time wore away, so that his Waving was more like thrashing; it took a conscious effort to thrust his pelvis back, to let his legs flop behind the motion of his hips, to let his head drive ahead of the bending of his spine. And his skin was coarsened by age, too, tough as old tree-bark in places; that had its advantages, but it meant that he had trouble feeling the places where the electric currents induced in his epidermis by his motion across the Magfield were strongest. Damn it, he could barely feel the Magfield now; he was, he thought sourly, Waving from memory.

Much like sex these days.

As always he carried his battered and trusted spear, a sharpened pole of wood prized from a tree trunk by his own father hundreds of months ago. His fingers nestled comfortably in the gripping grooves carved expertly in the shaft, and electrical currents Magfield-induced in the wood tingled in his palm. As his father had taught him, he kept the spear pointed along the direction of the Magfield across which they climbed… for, of course, the wood — in fact any material — was stronger in the direction of the Magfield than across it. And as any child knew, if danger did approach it would most likely come along the Magfield lines, in which direction motion was invisibly easy.

There weren’t many predators who would attack humans, but Adda had seen a few, and his father had told him of worse. The rays, for instance… Even a mature Air-boar — the tougher cousin of the Air-pig — could give a man or woman a hard fight, and could carry away a child as easy as snipping krypton grass away from the Crust, if it was hungry enough.

Even half as hungry as the Human Beings were going to grow before much longer.

He looked along the gleaming cage of vortex lines which swept to red-mist infinity at the South Pole, slicing up the sky around his companions. As always — whenever he traveled even a short distance from the illusory completeness of the tribe’s tiny human environ — he was struck by the immensity of the Mantle-world; and as his eye followed the converging parallels of the vortex lines he felt as if his tiny spirit, helpless with awe, was somehow drawn along the lines. The island of scattered debris which marked the site of their devastated encampment was a dirt-colored mote Air-marooned in the clean, yellow-white immensities of the Star. And his companions — nine of them still, he counted automatically — were Waving across the field lines with unconscious synchronization, ropes and nets wrapped loosely around their waists, their faces upturned to the Crust. One man had peeled away from the rest; he had found an abandoned spin-spider web slung across the vortex lines, and was searching it efficiently for eggs.

Human Beings looked so beautiful when they moved. And when a shoal of the kids went whirling along the Magfield — flapping their legs so hard you could see the glow of the induced fields shining in their limbs, and spiraling around the flux lines fast enough to turn them into blurs — well, it was hard to imagine a better sight in this or any of the fabled, lost worlds of the Ur-humans.

But at the same time humans looked so fragile, dwarfed as they were by the immensities of the vortex-line cage and by the deep and deadly mysteries of the Quantum Sea far below. Somehow an Air-pig looked the part for this environment, he thought. Round and fat and solid… Why, even a neutrino fount didn’t have to be the end for an Air-pig; all it had to do was to tuck in its eyes, fold down its fins and ride out the storm. Unless it got blasted out of the Star altogether, what could happen? When the fount was done the pig could just unfold, graze on whatever foliage it could find — for trees were trees, whichever part of the Crust they were growing out of — and mate with the first Air-pig it came across. Or get mated with, Adda thought with a grin.

Humans weren’t like that. Humans were delicate. Easily smashed up, broken apart. He thought of Esk: a damn fool, but nobody deserved to die like that. And, more than anything else, humans were strange. If Adda were to pluck one of these irritating little nibblers out of his dud eye now and look at it up close, he knew he’d find the same basic design as the average Air-pig: six fins, symmetrically placed, an intake-mouth to the front, jet vents to the rear, six tiny eyes. All Mantle animals were the same, just scaled big and small, or with differences of proportion; the basic features could be recognized even in superficially different creatures like rays.

…Except for humans. There was nothing, no other animal, like a human in all this world.

That wasn’t a surprise, of course. Every kid learned at his mother’s breast how the Ur-humans had come from somewhere far away — a place much better than this, of course; Adda suspected every human on every world grew up believing that — and had left children here to grow, to be strong, and to join the community of mankind one day, all under the beneficial and all-too-abstract gaze of that multiple God, the Xeelee.

So the Human Beings had been put there. Adda had no doubt about the basic truth of the old story — damn it, you only had to watch humans in flight to see the blinding self-evidence of it — but on the other hand, he thought as he watched the flock of Human Beings soar across the sky, he wouldn’t really want to be built like an Air-pig. Fat and round and flying by farts?

Mind you, flatulence was one skill he had bettered as he had got older. Maybe it wouldn’t have been such a bad idea to have been an Air-pig after all.

Adda was the oldest surviving Human Being. He knew what the others thought of him: that he was a sour old fool, too gloomy for his own good. But he didn’t care much about that. He hadn’t survived longer than any of his contemporaries by accident. But he was, and always had been, essentially a simple man, not gifted with the power over people and language shown by, say, a Logue. Or even a Dura, he thought, even though she mightn’t realize it yet. So if he irritated folk with anecdotes of his boyhood… but, even as they laughed at him, if they soaked up any one of the small lessons which had kept him alive… well, that was all right by Adda.

Of course, there were fragments from the past he didn’t share with anyone. He’d no doubt, for instance, that the Glitches were changing.

There had always been Glitches, spin storms. He even knew what caused them, in an abstract sort of way: the slowing of the Star’s rotation, and the consequent explosive equalizations of spin energy. But over the last few years the Glitches had got worse… far worse, and much more frequent.