Paul stood, astonished. Although the closest of the creatures had been only a few paces away from him, and had been hurled sideways like a bullet fired from a gun, he had felt no wind at all.

Of the dozens, one wood louse remained, squirming helplessly on the ground at Kunohara's feet. "They even speak. . . ." the man said quietly, but he almost sounded shocked. Kunohara snaked his fingers into the plates behind the creature's head, pushing deep. Something crunched and the thing lay still.

"You saved me," Paul said. "Those things would have killed me. . . ."

The man peered at him, then lifted the curled corpse of the man-sized wood louse. He turned his back on Paul and lowered his head. Paul had the distinct impression that his savior was about to vanish.

"Wait! You can't just leave!"

The smaller man paused. "I did not bring you here." His English was very precise. "In fact, you are trespassing. I did not need to rescue you, but these . . . monsters offend me. You are free to leave the way you came in."

"But I don't even know how I got here."

"That is nothing to me." He shrugged and hefted the dead bug. "It is bad enough, finding my blameless isopods corrupted like this. I will not also be made a park ranger in my own home."

"What do you mean, corrupted?" Paul was desperate to keep the man from leaving. He sensed that his rescuer was not toying with him—he genuinely intended to leave him alone in the wilderness. The wood lice were gone, but the thought of what other horrors might be lurking was almost enough to make Paul throw himself on the other man to keep him from going, to cling to his legs like a frightened toddler. "You're Kunohara, aren't you? This is your simulation world."

The other did not reply, but the look of heightened caution that flitted across his face was enough to tell Paul he was right.

"Look, can you at least tell me if you know anything about where my friends are? You've met them before—here and in the House world."

Kunohara snorted. It was hard to tell whether it was a noise of amusement or disgust. "So you are one of Atasco's orphans," he said. "I am almost sorry now I saved you. You and your friends have brought ruin on me." He turned his back again, waving his hand dismissively. "Go and find your own road to hell."

"What are you talking about? At least tell me if you've seen them! Are they here somewhere?"

Kunohara turned around, his look of anger shifting to something more subtle, if not more friendly. "I have not seen you before with those other fools—and you have not been in my world before either, I think. So who are you?"

Paul felt himself at another crossroad. This man Kunohara was clearly no friend to Renie and the others, and Paul was reluctant with good reason to tell people his own name. But he could feel Kunohara slipping away from him. In a moment the man would be gone, leaving Paul alone in a place where he was no bigger than an ant.

"No, I haven't been here before," he said. "My name is Paul Jonas."

Both of Kunohara's eyebrows now rose. "So you are the man for whom Jongleur tore the system apart. Why does he want you? You do not look like much!" He threw his hands apart, a gesture of frustration or resignation. "Come."

"Come . . . where?"

"To my house on the river." For the first time, Kunohara smiled, but it was scarcely more than a brief grimace. "I might as well ask you a few questions before I give you back to the local Crustacea." He nodded his head once and the environment blurred around them so swiftly and unexpectedly that for a moment Paul thought the ground had literally been yanked from beneath his feet. A moment later everything jumped back into place again and Paul gasped at a world gone suddenly pear-shaped.

The sky curved over him like a weirdly gleaming bowl, and the towering trees which had stretched upward like pillars holding the heavens now bent above him like bystanders examining an accident victim. Paul felt a solid floor beneath his feet, and turned slowly to discover an entire room behind him, multileveled, furnished sparsely but attractively with screens and low furniture. Beyond the furnishings, the stairs, and the different levels of flooring, the world seemed to distort again, but instead of trees and sky, the other half of the wide space seemed to cower beneath a curved wall of foaming water.

The effect was so bizarre that it took long seconds before Paul realized that the curvature of sky and trees and water was because the room was. . . .

". . . A big . . . bubble?"

Kunohara shook his head, but only because he was amused. "It is not so big, really—it is you and I who are small. The bubble floats in an eddy between two cataracts of the river." He gestured to the wall of water which seemed to hang above the back of his bubble-house. "There, see the river pour down? It is most pleasant to watch its motion—turbulence is paradoxically soothing, whereas too much regularity can be maddening."

"I don't get it." Paul swiveled to look out what he thought of as the "front" of the house, with its leaning trees and broad if distorted view of the river spreading out below the cataract, then turned back to the curtain of foaming water behind them. He could feel the boil of water pushing steadily at the bubble, although the movement it imparted to the house was surprisingly gentle, like the rolling of a sailboat at anchor. "If this place is just a bubble, and there's water pouring down behind us, why don't we go over the waterfall?"

"Because this is my world." Kunohara was beginning to sound irritated again. "It is easy enough to keep the bubble floating in one place, balanced in the eddy, circling gently to the side of the main current."

Paul thought it would be even easier just to make the house out of something more substantial and stick it down, or use some programmer's magic code to ensure that the bubble would stay rigidly in one place no matter what, but clearly Kunohara found something to like in the sound and feel of the moving water, the delicate way the bubble swayed and spun. Paul was just glad he was not prone to seasickness. He turned from the view and examined the rest of the multileveled room, the floor covered in rugs and soft mats, the tables low to the ground in the ancient Japanese style.

"Are you interested in the natural sciences?" Kunohara asked suddenly.

"Certainly." Paul was anxious to keep his host happy. Polite chitchat beat the hell out of being thrown back to the ravenous pseudo-bugs any day. "I mean, I'm no expert. . . ."

"Go to those stairs. Wave your hand on the topmost step, so, then go down."

Paul paused at the top of the staircase, looking down into a lower level of Kunohara's house, this one seemingly not much different than the other, except that the floor was made from some dark, glassy substance. Paul waved his hand and the lights in the lower room went out, and he suddenly realized that he was looking not at a dark floor, but at the bottom of the bubble, gazing directly down through its transparency into the river.

Without the reflections obscuring his view he could see the rocky bottom of the river-pond beneath him, which to his eyes seemed as craggy and distant as a mountain range seen from a passenger seat on a jet. From time to time vast shapes slid between stones on the riverbottom, creatures which made Paul flinch in atavistic fear, although he knew that they must be very small fish by any normal standards. There were also a few semi transparent animals a little like attenuated, spider-legged lobsters or even more unusual shapes. Paul moved down to the bottommost step and stood there, reluctant to step onto the glassy material even though he could see a low couch and other furnishings below him, indicating that the floor could hold weight. One of the lobster-things floated up and bumped its head against the bubble, black bead eyes swiveling on stalks, whip-thin legs scrabbling across the curving surface, perhaps wondering why it could not reach something it could see.