When it came again, the voice was quieter, not distorted but diminished, with clean holes in the flow of speech. "We never left . . . mountain," she said. "We're in . . . must be . . . ocean. But I've lost !Xabbu and. . . ."

"We can't understand you very well. Where are you exactly?"

". . . Think I'm . . . like the heart of the system." For the first time, Paul could hear the terror subdued beneath collapsing control. "But I'm . . . trouble—bad trouble. . . !"

There was nothing after that, no matter how many times Martine begged her to speak again. At last Martine put the lighter away and they sat in silence, carried as froth on the river surface, hurrying toward the end of one world among many.

NETFEED/BUSINESS: Death of Figueim Leaves Shipbuilding Firm High and Dry

(visual: Figueira breaking bottle across bow of tanker)

VO: The sudden death of Maximiliao Figueira, chairman and CEO of Figueira Maritima SA, Portugal's largest shipbuilding firm, has left the company reeling.

(visual: Heitor do Castelo, FM company spokesman)

DO CASTELO: "We are all shocked. For his age, he was in excellent health, but what is even more confusing is how little preparation he seems to have made for the event of his death. He was not a man to delegate, so we had hoped he had prepared for this eventuality a little more thoroughly. We will persevere and retain our leading position in the industry, but I must honestly admit we are scrambling to untangle some very confusing arrangements. . . ."

At first it seemed like a kind of trick !Xabbu was playing, leading them carefully along the banks of a river that only he could see, but after a while even Sam could perceive clearly what her companion had sensed so much earlier.

It started as lines in the never-ending gray, faint as pencil markings but less substantial: when Sam approached one, or even changed her angle of view, the mark was gone. It was only as the lines became longer and more numerous that she saw they were rims of shadow delineating big basic shapes—rolling curves like distant hills and a line marking the river-shape !Xabbu had been following. Although there was nothing like a sun, and in fact still very little differentiation between ground and sky, the light for the first time was beginning to have an implied direction.

With the alteration of the light also came a change in the color of things. The gray became livelier and more slippery. A faint sheen moved through it, gleaming here and there like the skin of an eel. Although all around her still was strange and mostly formless, Sam felt a loosening in her heart. The endless nothing finally seemed to be coming alive.

"It's like swimming in a silver ocean," she said wonderingly. For a long time the void above their heads had been indistinguishable from the void beneath their feet; now, showing the first gleaming striations that might eventually become clouds, it was beginning to take on a suggestion of expansiveness. Sam recognized the paradox: as long as there had been nothing to look at, emptiness did not seem to stretch very far. Now it was as though someone were pulling back a blanket, opening up their view of things. "It's like being underwater. Ho dzang! I feel like I can breathe again."

!Xabbu smiled at the odd combination of images. "I think the river has a sound now, too." He held up his hand. Sam stopped; even Jongleur paused. "Do you hear it?"

She did, a faint whisper of moving water. "What does all this mean?"

"I think it means that we are going to reach something more friendly to us than all that emptiness." !Xabbu dabbled his hand experimentally where the confluence of emerging shadow suggested the river must be, but drew it back dry. He shrugged. "But we have a distance still to walk, it seems, before that happens."

"No, I mean . . . what's happening with this place? It's so scanny, just this nothing, then . . . something. Like it was growing here."

He shook his head. "I cannot say, Sam. But I think it is not so much growing as that we are moving closer to the place it is most concentrated, if that makes sense." He looked at Jongleur, half-mocking. "Maybe you can explain to us?"

The sharp-faced man seemed for a moment about to say something dismissive, but when he spoke, he was surprisingly quiet. "I do not know. This is all a mystery. The Brotherhood built nothing like this in the network, nor did anyone else."

"Then we should continue," said !Xabbu. "If we are not clever enough to understand the mystery, perhaps it will be enough if we are simply strong enough to walk until we reach its heart."

Jongleur looked at him for a moment, then nodded his head slowly. He waited until !Xabbu had set out along the translucent riverbank again before moving into a steady, trudging gait behind him.

It was strange, Sam thought, how unobtrusively an entire world could swell into being. It was like music, the kind her parents listened to, with violins and other old instruments starting almost silently then growing before you noticed it into a huge noise.

The silvery phantom landscape was now shot through with colors, although they appeared only for short moments, rippling and disappearing as she moved, sometimes to be replaced by other equally unexpected hues. The glassy, ghostly hills traced on the far horizon gleamed deep purple, taking on weight and substance until she felt she could see every detail; then, as she walked another twenty paces, the purple seemed to retreat inward, leaving behind only a sketch of the hillcrest, colorless as a shed snakeskin. A moment later, just when the shapes had almost vanished against the equally pale and undefined sky, there would be a faceted glimmer of deep tan, almost orange, and for that brief instant there would be hills again and the world had something like a normal shape.

To the extent Sam could make sense of it, she and the others seemed to be moving toward those hills along the gentle slopes of a long and meandering valley, following the river's course upstream. When the river itself took color, she could see that it had cut a deep track in the land, twisting between stones that in their phantom stage looked almost like huge and irregular chunks of ice. Some of the larger ones lay across the river's path like bricks of glass, and here the water foamed as it spilled over and around them until it found the low ground once more. A few ghost-trees clustered along the banks and on the higher knolls, but most of the land seemed to suggest grassy meadows. Only her own breathing, and occasionally a muttered curse from Jongleur as he stumbled over some feature of the increasingly solid landscape, rivaled the sound of the river. No insects hummed, no birds sang.

"It's like someone's inventing it," she said when they had stopped again to rest. She was sitting on one of the flat rocks with the river roiling and whispering just an arm's length away. !Xabbu had no further need to sniff the air and listen; he sat beside her companionably, dangling his feet. Sam had reached down and found that the water still did not quite feel like water: the sensation was cool but dry, as though chilled silk were being dragged continuously across her skin. "It's like a coloring book for kids," she continued, "and someone's just starting to test a few colors, just getting started."

"I think rather it is the other way around." His face turned serious. "I think perhaps that this place was once all full of color and shape. Do you remember the black mountain? Solid and very real at first, then later it began to fade away? I think that has happened here, too."

Sam felt her first pang of real fear in hours. If !Xabbu was right, they were walking into reality faster than it was dissolving, but could that last forever? Or would they eventually find themselves, as they had on the mountain, with all of creation vanishing around them again? Would they have to go on and on that way, through abortive worlds that coalesced and then deteriorated around them, without a stable place where they could ever just stop and live like people?