"But I suppose that you did a pretty good job on that raft after all." Although it had been !Xabbu's deft repairs that had made it riverworthy, she knew but did not mention. "It's not your fault that the system won't let us cross that way."

He looked a little mollified.

"Are you really a Gypsy?" she asked.

His reaction was sudden and fierce. "Who told you such a foul thing?"

It was all Sam could do not to look at !Xabbu, who was holding quiet conversation with Jongleur thirty paces away across the muddy shallows. "Nobody . . . I . . . I just thought you said you were." She was furious with herself. "Maybe I just thought it because . . . because of that mustache."

He stroked the article in question as though it were an affronted animal he was soothing. "Gypsies, they are sneaks and thieves. Azador is an explorer. Do not misunderstand when I tell you of my adventures. I am a prisoner. I have the right to discover all I can, to take what I can from my captors."

"I'm sorry. I just misunderstood."

"You should be more careful." He gave her a hard stare. "This is a place where you must be cautious what you say to strangers."

Sam silently, emphatically agreed.

Another hour of fruitless investigation passed before she had a chance to talk to !Xabbu out of earshot of the others. He had joined her to scavenge in one last clump of reeds. Azador and Jongleur had given up, and were sitting on one of the meadowy hillocks, watching them.

"I'm such a scanbox," she said when she had explained what happened. "I should keep my mouth shut."

!Xabbu looked troubled. "Perhaps you blame yourself too much, as I did last night. Perhaps we have learned something, although I cannot say what. For one thing, it is very strange that he should say this now. Almost the only thing he would tell us before was that he was a Gypsy—Romany, as he called himself. He seemed very proud of it." The small man pulled aside a curtain of swaying cattails to reveal that what had looked from a distance like the remains of a wooden structure was only a tangle of tree trunks uprooted and piled by some storm. "Perhaps he is not the only one who has decided to keep his past a secret."

"I don't know. He didn't seem scared or nervous, like I would if someone knew something about me they shouldn't. He just seemed . . . angry." She looked to the hillside. Jongleur and Azador were talking, or seemed to be. It made her feel uneasy. "Look at that old monster just sitting there. It's his fault we can't find anyone to ask how to cross the river!" Whether it really was Jongleur's fault or not, they had seen no other inhabitants of the simworld since the old man had frightened Jecky Nibble and his charges away from their campfire.

"It is possible. But it may be they have all simply crossed over to someplace that is safer."

"Maybe." Sam frowned. "What could those two be saying to each other?"

!Xabbu looked up. "I do not know. I told the old man that Azador might become violent it he found out who Jongleur truly is. So I do not think he is telling him anything about that."

By the time they had climbed out of the mud and started up the grassy hillside, Azador had risen and walked away from Jongleur. He stood on the hilltop, facing away from them. As they neared the crest, he suddenly turned and shouted, "Come, come here! Look at this!"

Sam and !Xabbu hurried up the last few meters.

"Look," said Azador. "Can you see?"

"Oh, no!" Sam felt chilled. "They're fading out."

The distant hills were only ghostly outlines now, streaks of sunlit reflection, milky, misty indicators of where solid hills should stand. Even parts of the meadowed plain seemed to have turned transparent as glass. Sam looked around in panic, but the river and its banks were still solid behind them, the hillock beneath their feet still reassuringly lifelike.

"They are disappearing," Azador said. For the first time. she heard something like real fear in his voice. "What does it mean?"

"It means we are running out of time," Jongleur said, coming up from behind them. His face was carefully expressionless, but his voice was not entirely steady. "The simulation is dying."

!Xabbu woke her with a light touch. "I am going to be away from the camp for some time," he whispered. "I do not think I want to leave you with those two."

Sam got sleepily to her feet and stumbled after him. The stars seemed brighter than ever, as though burning in premature mourning for the vanishing world beneath them.

When they reached the nearest hilltop, !Xabbu sat and began tying something around his ankles, circlets made from river reeds and seedpods that rattled when they moved.

"What are those for?" Sam asked.

"Dancing," he said. "Please, Sam, I need quiet now."

Rebuffed, she sat down beside him and drew her knees up under her chin. The cloak of woven leaves !Xabbu had made for her was little protection against the cold, but the night was mild. She watched him finish his preparations, then he walked a few steps away from her and stood, staring straight up at the sky and its blazing stars.

He stood there a long time. Sam drifted into sleep again, then started awake to find him still standing in the same place, frozen like a statue. Her mind wandered, touching mournfully on the stars over her own backyard where she and her father had camped in sleeping bags, Sam secure in his silent company despite the night sounds of the garden, reassured by her mother's silhouette in the kitchen window.

What are they doing now? They can't spend all their time with . . . with me. In some hospital. Do they do other things? Watch the net? Have dinner with friends? Even if I die here, they have to have some kind of normal life again, don't they? But it seemed wrong—unfair. But would it be worse if they never got over it?

Oh, God, Mom, Dad, I'm so sorry. . . !

Slowly, !Xabbu began to move, lifting one foot in the air and sawing it back and forth like an impatient horse pawing at the ground. He stepped forward, lifted the other foot and shook it, then set it down too. The rattles gave a quiet, dry hiss. Gradually he began to move in a distinctive and intricate rhythm, the steps made even more exotic by the near-silence.

At first Sam watched him closely, trying to guess from the small man's absorbed expression what might be going on in his mind, but the dance went on too lengthily, too repetitively, to hold her attention: as he finished the first slow trip around a circle only he could see, she found her thoughts beginning to scatter again. His precise movements reminded her of a game she had once played, something on the net she had loved for about two weeks when she was young, where oddly-shaped building blocks had floated slowly through space and could be pushed together into expanding geometric structures. Like !Xabbu's dance, the blocks had revolved as if both heavy and weightless. Their intricate, multifaceted sides had kissed and stuck with just the same blend of delicacy and permanence as the lifting and setting down of each of the small man's feet, as though it were not blind brute gravity that held him to the earth but an act of careful choice.

I wonder if Orlando ever played that game, she thought sleepily. I wonder what he would have made with it—something different, that's for sure. Something funny and sad.

I wonder what !Xabbu would make. . . .

And then she herself spun slowly away into another place, dreaming of dark high mountains and the lonely cries of birds.

"Wake up, Sam." His voice seemed odd: for a moment, the dreams still muddling her, she thought it was Orlando who spoke.

"Let me sleep, you damn scanmaster."

"The light is coming back. We do not have the time to sleep late today, I think."