'Leave us alone! We will soon die here!'

Hornwrack could bear no more of it. He was used to a less equivocal violence. Retching, he stumbled over to Fulthor's inert body and got the powered broadsword from its ceramic sheath. He had never used one before. He went back and cut inexpertly at the flailing forelimbs and compound eyes of the ambassadors. This time they made a half-hearted fight of it as they backed into the purple gloom. But their odd, gnarled weapons only sputtered feebly in the damp.air; gave up strings of pale light: and failed utterly. They tumbled on to their sides as he chopped off their legs. They whirred round in circles, pushing the earth up into irregular mounds. Soon they were all dead. He stared at them in astonishment; at the artifact fizzing in his hand; at Fay Glass. At the last moment they had tried to direct his attention away from the hulk of Benedict Paucemanly's airboat, the Heavy Star.

The hull of this ship loomed over him, crawling with the enigmatic corrosions of its hundred-year sojourn in the Moon. It was embedded in a tall bulwark of compacted sand which curved away right and left like the shell of some huge stadium. Hornwrack walked round it, awed, exultant. That famous machine! Lights were dimly visible through its fissured outer skin; pulpy vines enwrapped it; a few flakes of black and silver paint adhered to its stern – the colours of the House of Methven, set there at the height of the air-siege of Mingulay.

“'Fear death from the air!”'shouted Hornwrack. He laughed. He took hold of the madwoman's wrist in his enthusiasm and pulled her along after him. “'Fear death from the air!”'He thought of Fat Main Etteilla, and the Bistro Californium with its clientele of perverts and poseurs. He thought of the dwarf who had beaten him up in the palace and then abandoned him in the shadow of the Agdon Roches. He thought of the High City, which had wooed him merely to betray him. He thought of the Low City, of the boy in the Rue Sepile, the drifts of sodden chestnut leaves in the late-afternoon light of November, the women laughing in the upstairs rooms. He though of the candle at night, a cat sneaking into the room, the smell of geraniums – one dawn following another until they made eighty years of wounds and fevers. None of it meant anything. It was as if he had been relieved of these things, only to have them changed somehow and given back to him merely as memories. 'If I can rip her loose we'll fight our way out of this madhouse!'he said. He would fly down to the Pastel City in the last airboat left in the kingdom. There he would speak with the dwarf, perhaps even the Queen. There he'd state his terms. 'She'll never take to space again,'he said, rubbing his thumb over the thin, whitish, lichen-like growths, the network of tiny cracks that dulled the crystal skin. Even this slight contact made him shiver with excitement. He kicked at a door in the stern to see if it would open, and was rewarded by a hollow boom. 'But her motors still work. Look!'

He dropped the High City sword suddenly, grasped the girl by her upper arms. She stared blankly at him. 'Once I flew such vessels!'he cried: 'Don't you believe me?'And then: 'That ghost has given me back the sky. It has given me back the sky!'

Alstath Fulthor came up behind him on all fours and picked up the discarded baan. Some nightmare of the past had him by the head. He sniggered.

'I'll suffer nothing at the hands of those beautiful philosophers,'he said. 'I'll promenade no more in their metallic gardens!'

He jumped to his feet, whirling the blade in sputtering arcs round his head. Sparks showered from it into the dead wet air. Discovering no other enemy he advanced on Hornwrack, who produced defensively his steel knife, shouting. 'Fulthor, no more grudges! Stop!'

Fulthor could not stop. Hornwrack allowed him to get in close; ducked the baan as it swung in towards his collar bone; and slashed out at Fulthor's hand, taking off two fingers and severing all the major tendons. Fulthor dropped the power blade. He studied his hand in wonder.

'That hand will never annoy me again,'he said.

Before they could stop him he had run off into the gloom, singing.

Hornwrack said, 'I did not mean to do that. This knife had betrayed me.'He threw it down and stepped on it; but the blade would not break despite its flaw, and after a moment he forgot it. He retrieved the baan and set about chopping his way into the Heavy Star through the stern door. His blows set up a resonant groaning in the crystal hull. He pulled the madwoman in after him. She stared back over her shoulder.

The boat was abandoned and empty. Its motors sent up slow violet motes through a rift in the deck: small worms of light that clung to the metal surfaces, fastened on Hornwrack's mail shirt, and clustered round the steel fillet which bound back his hair. Further in, navigation instruments ticked and sang; he could hear them. It was thick with dust in there. He moved about quietly, touching the things with which he was familiar. He shivered a little. In the command-bridge was a light like sunshine filtered through bottle-green glass. 'Go and sit down,'he told Fay Glass. (An insect had entered through the damaged hatch; he could hear it moving about in the hold.) The bow of the boat projected right through the wall of the 'stadium'he had seen outside, but nothing was visible through the port-holes, which seemed to be covered by some gelatinous medium like agar. Aft, the insect scratched its way across the hold; paused. Its wings whirred faintly. It departed. Hornwrack let out his breath.

He swallowed.

'Sit still,'he told the woman.

He tried to remember what to do.

Under his clumsy hands the vessel groaned and shook. (It was old. In the Moon something vital had gone out of it, some millennial reservoir had been emptied.) Down below, its motors pulsed, leaking light and generating a rapid percussive shudder. This continued for some minutes, and, transmitted to the outer hull, split it open with a high ringing sound. Splinters of dark glass flew about the bridge; a fissure twenty inches wide appeared in the wall beside Hornwrack's shoulder, admitting foetid gases; Fay Glass was picked up and flung against a bulkhead, and thereafter lay on the deck like a discarded towel, her thin bruised legs drawn up under her chin. The boat lifted an inch or two and was stationary again. Gelatinous fluids streamed off the forward portholes and slopped into the bridge where, mixed with the sand from the wall outside, they formed a foul and slimy secretion. Hornwrack clung to his seat.

'You bitch,'he said. 'You old bitch.'

Outside, sand could be seen fountaining up against a purple sky. With a despairing groan Heavy Star pulled free of the retaining wall and hurled itself into the mad airs above. Hornwrack sobbed with relief. Around him, instruments were demanding his attention in hysterical whispers, but he had forgotten what most of them were for. The smell of the stuff in the cabin was making him feel sick. He leaned forward to look out of the portholes. The boat was wallowing above an elliptical walled pit about a hundred yards long. This was filled with a grey, viscous, partly-organic substance which was now leaking from the breached wall like the white of an egg. As the level of this putrid stuff fell it revealed by stages a colossal human figure stretched out in the pit.

Benedict Paucemanly!

A monstrous and corrupt flowering of his flesh had taken place in all those white years on the Moon. Constrained by a thick rubber suit in case he burst, studded with new sensory organs, whorls and ropes of flesh which reported only mutation and pain, he lay there prostrate. He had tried to become something else and failed. His arms were by his sides and his vast corpulent legs apart. It was from here that he had broadcast his despairing spectre, to Viriconium and beyond. 'I want only death.'Teetering between two realities, he could perceive neither of them except as an agonizing dream – and yet here he was half a god, a demiurge or source, out from which spread like the ripples on a stagnant pond all the new nightmares of Earth: he had become, unwillingly enough, the amplifier of the swarm's Umwelt, as he had once been an ear that listened to the stars. He had lain like this for ten years, groaning and whimpering and vomiting into the mask which had long ago been forced over his bloated head so that he could see something of the world surrounding him. Worse: through his great corroded bulk burrowed the parasitic larvae of the swarm, deposited there when gravity first sucked them down and mortalized them. A thousand miles away, in the false windows of the throne-room at Viriconium, his other image was telling Cellur: 'The breeding cells are full. Whatever emerges will wrest the Earth to its own purposes.