The insects ignored this lowing call – as of some large but delicately-organized animal being disembowelled – and forced themselves in and out like wasps round a rotting apple. They buzzed erratically across the plain; hurled themselves into the pits they had dug; and gathered in the dark air in diffuse humming clouds. Meanwhile, the Heavy Star, stern down, fabric wounded by the curious stresses of space, floundered toward them with blue lights leaking from its engine rooms. They were aware of it. It fascinated them. They made sudden abortive darts and forays in its direction. Did they link it with their flight down from the Moon? Did they perceive Galen Hornwrack encysted at the heart of its simple nervous system? Some of the more daring individuals threw themselves against its hull, only to topple away into the convection currents and streams of floating debris; which consumed them. This agitation grew as Hornwrack approached the erupting City. Their forays became more purposeful, and more prolonged. The City pulsed and heaved, generating a savage mauve glare, and they came up from it like smoke.

Up on the watershed Fulthor and the madwoman, interrupted in some partial rite of the Afternoon, some fragment of an old sin, shaded their eyes against the novel light. (Their iconic calm now representing a wiser – or at least more ordered – station of the world, a culture which would surely have taken such fireworks in its stride…) The plain was alive with crippled insects, tiny as aphids and bathed in the magnetic radiations of the City. A cold wind sprang up, lashed the boggy waste, and – rolling their wingless corpses before it like the discarded regalia of a mystery play – rushed away into the north; while above, the Heavy Star, a wobbling black mote in the hectic air, rose to meet the spreading swarm, and was engulfed.

They fastened themselves on to its outer hull like locusts on a branch. It strained forward as if the air had solidified around it; and was brought to a standstill above the perimeter of the City, where the hulk of Benedict Paucemanly greeted it with booms and roars of self-pity, waving his infested limbs. (From up on the watershed this activity seemed like the movements of some tiny damaged mechanical toy.) He had replaced his mask but was unable to secure it, so that it hung awry on his blubbering tublike head like the woollen cap on the head of a retarded child. His new organs pulsed, engorging themselves in time to the rhythms of the City. 'In the Moon,'he said, 'it was like white gardens.'He begged for freedom in an abandoned language. He blinked up, watching the insects as they continued to alight on his old ship. When they could find no further space to settle they attached themselves to one another in a parody of copulation. Beneath this rustling layer the Heavy Star struggled to gain height. Suddenly, violet bodides arced from its bows! Caught up in the discharge of the ancient cannon many of the insects dropped away crackling and roasting and setting fire to their neighbours, so that they fell about the ears of the decaying airboatman like burning leaves.

Fear death ftom the air! Up there, we can see, Hornwrack fears nothing. He makes the boat his own. Powerplants enfeebled by its unimaginable journeys, substructure creaking like an old door, it nevertheless wriggles ecstati-cally under his hands, light flaring off its stern. We see it even now, long after the fact, rolling and spinning against the southern quadrant of the sky. The patterns it is making are gay, adventive, dangerous. It tumbles off the top of a loop and falls like a. stone. It soars eighteen hundred feet vertically upwards, spraying violet fire almost at random into the dark green varnished sky. Persistence of vision makes of it a paintbrush, violet strokes on an obsidian ground, while the insects fall like comets all around it, trailing a foul black smoke, to shatter and burst pulpily on the plain beneath! Even the watchers on the watershed have abandoned their cruel calm. He may yet escape! something whispers inside them. He might yet escape!… But now the energy cannon has stopped working, and he seems to have undergone a fatal faltering or change of heart. They bite their lips and urge him on. Some listlessness, though, prevents him: something inhaled from the cabbagey air of the Low City long ago. Now the Heavy Star drifts immediately above Paucemanly's carcass like an exhausted pilot fish. The insects descend. All Hornwrack's efforts have made no impression on their numbers. One by one they approach the wallowing vehicle. One by one they settle on its creaking, riven old hull and commence to bear it down…

Fay Glass, shading her eyes, looked out across the plain.

The City was a throbbing sepulchre of light. At the height of every spasm light vomited from it into the world, bringing a chaotic new reality and causing vast attenuated shadows to flicker across the stony plain; while above it hovered the swarm like an antithetical twin, a giant shadowy planet composed of interlocking wings, curled abdomens and entangled insectile legs, from which glittered thousands of mosaic eyes. Deep inside it was buried the Heavy Star, the whine and groan of its engines overlaid by an unearthly stridulation – a dry, triumphant song like the song of the wasteland locust as it rushes over the bony spaces of the south. Lulled by its own barren psalm, the swarm basked in the light of its coming transformation, anticipating the day when its larvae, made over entirely, should leave the refuge of the mutated airman and come forth into a reality neither human nor insect; and themselves bask in the warmth of a totally unknown sun.

'Such a long way,'she said dreamily (and apropos, perhaps, of something else: for what could she know?) 'Such a long way, and so many wings.'.

But now the Heavy Star tapped some final resource. The swarm, caught unawares, shook itself out into the density of a cloud of winter smoke. From this burst Galen Hornwrack and his legendary craft – which, devouring its own substance, was spilling a lemon-yellow light from every rift and porthole!

There was a thoughtful pause, as if he were surveying his chances.

Then, before the swarm could act again, he switched off the motors, and the boat began to fall straight down toward the city; slowly at first, then faster and faster.

What ofViriconium – Pastel City and erstwhile centre of the world – at this desperate conjunction, amid the mass abdication of real things and the triumph of metaphysics? Twin sister of the City on the distant plain, she nevertheless approaches her dissolution with a kind of fatalistic calm (stemming perhaps from a sense of history – 'an irony in the very stones'- and the feeling that it may all have happened before. Who has lived here for long, Ansel Verdigris asks us, in the fragmentary polemic Answers, without experiencing some such sensation?). Her cold plazas and antique alleys reeking of cabbage accept their fate. Her geometries accept their fate. Her people accept their fate: they are so superstitious that they believe almost everything; and so vulgar they have noticed hardly anything.

In the Artists'Quarter, in the Bistro Californium, they stare at one another and the door; sitting in the blue and gamboge shadows like wax figures waiting for a murder, for their own long-sensed termination which at once fascinates and frightens them. 'I dined with the hertis-Padnas.''Oh, shut up.'Unearthly structures have insinuated themselves between the towers on the hill at Minnet-Saba: hanging galleries under the fat white Moon, like veins of quartz; sandy domes and papery things like wasps'nests. All have an immaterial feel, the air of an intrusion from some other imagination: but the Low City streets are generally so cold that there is nobody in them to notice. And the Reborn have gone. (All night long on the high paths of the Monar their columns move uneasily north. Many will die of cold. Out among the tottering seracs of the glaciers, their advance parties report mirages.) So there is no-one abroad in the High City to see the palace of Methvet Nian pulsing like a great alchemical rose up there at the summit of the Proton Way, its filigree outer shell warping with light. No stars are visible above that hall, only there is a feeling of some heavy weight, some great uncommon cloud balanced above it. Its corridors are deserted but for the crawling survivors of the Sign trying to become insects -The palace awaited its end, breathing like an old woman: