Hand in hand and cautiously they set their feet upon a pathway neither liquid nor adamantine, but apparently of a dense, purple gas which yielded only slightly as they stepped along it, passing between forms which could have been the remains either of buildings or of beasts.

"Oh, mama!" The eyes of the boy were bright with unusual excitement. "Shall we find monsters?"

"I doubt if it is life, in any true sense, that we witness here, Snuffles. There is only a moral. A lesson for you — and for myself."

Streamers of pale red wound themselves around the whispering towers, like pennants about their poles. Gasping, he pointed, but she refused the sight more than a brief glance. "Sensation, only," she said. "The appeal to the infantile imagination is obvious — the part of every adult that should properly be suppressed and which should not be encouraged too much in children."

Blue winds blew and the buildings bent before them, crouching and changing shape, grumbling as they passed. Clusters of fragments, bloody marble, yellow-veined granite, lilac-coloured slate, frosted limestone, gathered like insects in the air; fires blazed and growled, and then where the pathway forked they saw human figures and stopped, watching.

It was an arrangement of gallants, all extravagant cloaks and jutted scabbards. It stuck legs and elbows at brave angles so the world should know its excellence and its self-contained beauty, so that the collective bow, upon the passing of a lady's carriage, should be accomplished with a precision of effect, swords raised, like so many tails, behind, heads bent low enough for doffed plumes to trail, and be soiled, upon the pavings.

Calling, she approached the group, but it had vanished, background, carriages and all, before she had taken three paces, to be replaced by exotic palms which forever linked and twisted their leaves and leaned one towards the other, as if in a love dance. She hesitated, thinking that she saw beyond the trees a plaza where stood a familiar old man, her father, but it was a statue, and then it was a pillar, then a fountain, and through the rainbow waters she saw three or four faces which she recognized, fellow children, known before her election to adult status, smiling at her, memories of an innocence she sometimes caught herself yearning for; a voice spoke, seemingly into her ear (she felt the breath, surely!): "The Armatuce shall be Renowned through you, Dafnish…" Turning, clutching her son's hand, she discovered only four stately birds walking on broad, careful feet into a shaft of light which absorbed them. Elsewhere, voices sang in strange, delicate languages, of sadness, love, joy and death. A cry of pain. The tinkling of bells and lightly brushed harp strings. A groan and deep-throated laughter.

"Dreams," said the boy. "Like dreams, mama. It is so wonderful."

"Treachery," she murmured. "We are misled." But she would not panic.

Once or twice more, in the next few moments, buildings shaped themselves into well-known scenes from her recent past. In the shifting light and the gas it was as if all that had ever existed existed again for a brief while.

She thought: "If Time has ceased to be, then Space, too, becomes extinct — is all this simply illusion — a memory of a world? Do we walk a void, in reality? We must consider that a likelihood."

She said to Snuffles: "We had best return to our ship."

A choir gave voice in the surrounding air, and the city swayed to the rhythm. A young man sang in a language she knew:

And she paused to listen, against the nagging foreboding at the back of her brain, while an old man sang:

Telling herself that her interest was analytical, she bent her head to hear more, but though the singing continued, very faintly, the language had changed and was no longer in a tongue she could comprehend.

"Oh, mama!" Snuffles glanced about him, as if seeking the source of the singing. "They tell of a great air battle. Is it that which destroyed the folk of this city?"

"… without which the third level is next to useless …" said an entirely different voice in a matter-of-fact tone.

Rapidly, she shook her head, to clear it of the foolishness intimidating her habitual self-control. "I doubt it, Snuffles. If you would seek a conqueror, then Self-Indulgence is the villain who held those last inhabitants in sway. Every sight we see confirms that fact. Oh, and Queen Sentimentality ruled here, too. The song is her testament — there were doubtless thousands of similar examples — books, plays, tapes — entertainments of every sort. The city reeks of uncontrolled emotionalism. What used to be called Art."

"But we have Art, mama, at home."

"Purified — made functional. We have our machine-makers, our builders, our landscapers, our planners, our phrasemakers. Sophisticated and specific, our Art. This — all this — is coarse. Random fancies have been indulged, potential has been wasted…"

"You do not find it in any way attractive?"

"Of course not! My sensibility has long since been mastered. The intellects which left this city as their memorial were corrupt, diseased. Death is implicit in every image you see. As a festering wound will sometimes grow fluorescent, foreshadowing the end, so this city shines. I cannot find putrescence pleasing. By its existence this place denies the point of every effort, every self-sacrifice, every martyrdom of the noble Armatuce in the thousand years of its existence!"

"It is wrong of me, therefore, to like it, eh, mama?"

"Such things attract the immature mind. Children once made up the only audience a senile old man could expect for his silly ravings, so I've heard. The parallel is obvious, but your response is forgivable. The child who would attain adult status among the Armatuce must learn to cultivate the mature view, however. In all you see today, my son, you will discover a multitude of examples of the aberrations which led mankind so close, so many times, to destruction."