It was the home world. The original home world.

The ark-makers had brought life from there to here. That’s what the black line connecting the central window to the one that sometimes showed Dybo’s ruling room indicated.

But the ark-makers had also brought life from the home world to that fourth planet in the system of eleven, to that second planet in the system of five, to the single planet that somehow orbited a double sun, to…

Novato’s whole body was shaking. Floating in the air, she hugged herself tightly. The home world.

Life scattered from there to stars across the firmament.

It was incredible.

Eyes wide, she watched the windows change, cycling from world to world.

Sometimes, the windows came up black.

Not just night, but solid black.

Novato’s heart fluttered.

Black.

Windows onto nothingness.

Maybe the magic had failed after all this time. These windows were new, of course, but surely at the other end there were eyes of some sort that sent back these pictures. It had been a long time since the ark had crashed here. Maybe some of the eyes had failed in that time.

Or maybe whole worlds had died in the interim.

Novato’s head pounded. She turned her attention again to the glowing white numbers overlapping the upper left corner of each window. The number that showed when the window looked in on the Quintaglio moon was 27. When showing the other bipedal reptile, the number 26 was displayed. Ah, there were the stilt-legged aquatic creatures again; number 9. The red globs with their city of coral was number 1. She saw four numbers higher than 27, and all them showed bipedal lifeforms covered with brown shag. And the central window always showed the horizontal mark of zero.

Slowly, it began to make sense. Her overloaded mind cleared, the fog lifting.

She’d seen the Quintaglios removed from prominence twice in her own lifetime. First, Afsan had taken them from the center of the universe. Then Toroca had shown they weren’t divinely created from the hands of God. And now — this.

A total of thirty-one different worlds had been seeded with life from the home planet. And, if the numbering was in the order in which the life was transplanted, then the Quintaglios had been moved not first, nor last, but twenty-seventh — twenty-seventh out of thirty-one. No pride of place, just one of many.

Floating there in the vast chamber, she watched, fascinated, as the strange lifeforms were paraded by her. Red globs. Stilt-legged creatures. Intelligent reptiles. Tailless bipeds. Flying things. Crawling things. Things that had twenty arms. Things that had none.

Windows cycling from world to world, the light of alien suns raying across her face.

She tried to absorb as much of it as she could.

But eventually she was left numb by it all, unable to take in anything further. The windows became a blur again, just nine colored squares.

She needed to take a break, needed to let her mind sort it all out. She decided to explore, to look at other parts of the vast structure at the top of the tower. And that presented a problem.

She was too far away from any wall or from the floor or ceiling to reach out and touch it, and so she just floated there in the middle of the cube-shaped room. She tried flapping her arms, like a wingfinger, but that didn’t seem to do any good. She soon realized she was in quite a predicament: she could starve to death floating here in midair, unable to make it back to the lifeboat, which held her food supplies.

But, after a moment, she calmed down, undid the chain that helped hold her sash in place and bit through the leather of the sash so that she had one long piece of green and black material. Cracking it like a whip against the wall containing the bank of windows, she was able to start herself tumbling slowly across the room. She made her way out into a corridor and continued along, kicking gently off walls. Most of what she saw was baffling, but at last she came to something she recognized: one of the ark-maker’s doors, just like the one on the outside of the ark itself. It was a panel twice as tall as it was wide, with an incised orange rectangle with bold black markings on it set into the door’s center. Novato floated toward it…

— and the door opened. Of its own volition, the door slid aside. Incredible. She’d long suspected this was how such doors were supposed to work, having seen the gears and other equipment inside the ones down below. But they were all dead; the Quintaglios had had to remove orange faceplates from the center of the ark’s door panels, exposing metal handles that could be cranked around by hand. Novato was sure now that those manual handles were for emergencies, when no power was available. That’s why they were kept out of the way behind the orange

panels.

Novato’s inertia had carried her right through the door, but to her surprise she found herself hitting a wall almost at once. No … it wasn’t a wall. It was a second door. This was another one of those confounded double-doored rooms.

But surely this door should have opened on its own, too. Oh, well; she’d operated enough of these things manually down below. She extended her claws and flicked back the little clips that held the orange panel in place. It popped forward, revealing the handle.

Novato reached for the handle and began to crank it around…

Suddenly, the door behind her began to slide shut, but her tail was sticking out through it. The door pushed against her tail, but before the pressure got too great it reversed itself and slid open again.

Novato heard — or perhaps felt was a better word — a sound. It was very high pitched, making her teeth rattle in their sockets and her claws itch. The door behind her had reversed again, touching her tail once more.

The sound was cycling back and forth, like a repetitive call.

Novato pulled again on the handle.

And then…

A sliver of blackness down the right side of the door.

A torrent of wind…

Incredible pain in her ears.

Her hands went to the sides of her head, completely covering her earholes.

Blood spurted from her nostrils.

Stars were visible down the black gap.

Stars.

Her skin tingled.

She slammed her eyes shut, inner and outer lids crunched tightly against the pressure mounting within her orbs.

Like a vast storm, air rushed through the opening.

Blood was leaking from her anus and her genital folds.

The evacuating air was pulling her toward the partially open joor, but the opening was too small for her to be carried outside.

There was great pain, searing pain, claw-sharp pain…

And then the pain began to subside.

Everything began to subside.

Novato’s consciousness ebbed away…

*23*

Afsan came at once to the ruling room. The Emperor read the leather strip containing Toroca’ s message to him. Afsan had Dybo repeat the text twice. Finally, he shook his head. "We don’t stand a chance."

"Why not?" said Dybo. "My imperial guards are well trained; our hunters have great prowess. Granted, victory will be difficult, but I don’t see why it should be impossible. Besides, if these … these Others are coming here, we have the advantage of fighting on terrain familiar to us."

"That’s irrelevant." Afsan’s tail swished. "Consider this: our people are constrained by territoriality. Toroca says the Others are not. We might be able to bring ten or fifteen hunters together, but they can bring a hundred or even a thousand."

"They’re only bringing forty boats," said Dybo. "Even a big ship like the Dasheter carries less than twenty people."

"That’s territoriality again," said Afsan. "The Dasheter could carry a hundred people if they could be crowded together in multi-bunk rooms like those aboard the alien ark. Those forty ships could contain more people than in all of Capital City. If what Toroca says is correct, they could swarm over us, like insects over dead meat. We will be hopelessly outnumbered."