Tired as he was, something probed at the edge of his awareness. It seemed darker than before. Why should that be? He pushed himself out of the ward and Waved a few weary mansheights into the sky. Behind him, the Skin was a limitless wooden wall which cut away half of the sky. It was bounded about by the huge anchor-bands and punctuated by a hundred crude gashes; a slowing trickle of cars and people still dribbled from the opened-up walls and diffused into the wastes of the Air. The Skin was dark, intimidating…

Too dark. That was it.

Adda Waved a little further and twisted his head around, surveying the Corestuff anchor-bands. The huge hoops were like a gray cage over the City’s wooden face — but they were dull, lifeless, where a little earlier they had crackled with blue electron gas.

The glow of the gas had gone.

So the dynamos, the huge, wood-burning lungs of the City, had failed at last. Perhaps they had been abandoned by their attendants; or maybe some essential part of the City’s infrastructure had failed under the strain of holding the City against the fluctuating Magfield.

It scarcely mattered.

There was a sharp explosion. A hail of splinters fanned out from the base of the City, at the junction of the Spine and the main inhabited section. The splinters sailed away through the showers of sewage material still falling from the base of Parz.

There might be no more than heartbeats left.

Adda Waved strongly back to the improvised Hospital port and dived into the melee of swaddled patients, harassed staff and volunteers. He found Farr helping Deni Maxx to fix a patient’s bandages. He grabbed Farr’s and Deni’s arms roughly; he hauled them away from the unconscious patient and toward the exit.

“We’ve got to get out of here.”

Deni stared at him, the deep yellow Air-light scouring shadow-lines in her face. “What is it? I don’t understand.”

“The anchor-bands have lost power,” Adda hissed. “They can’t sustain the City, here above the Pole. The City’s going to drift — come under intense stress… We have to get away from here. The City will never withstand it…”

Farr glanced back to the patients and helpers. “But we’re not finished.”

“Farr,” Adda said with all the persuasiveness he could muster, “it’s over. You’ve done a marvelous job, but there’s nothing more you can do. Once the effects of the band failure hit we won’t be able to complete the evacuation anyway.”

Deni Maxx stared into his face, her mouth tight. “I’m not leaving.”

Adda felt his scarred old heart break once more.

“But you’ll die,” he said, hearing a plea in his voice. “These wretched people can never survive anyway. There’s no point…”

She pulled her arm from his grasp. She looked back into the ward, as if all this had been a mere distraction from her work.

When he placed his hand on the crude doorframe he felt a deep, shuddering vibration, coming from the very bones of the City, and shivers of turbulence crept across the bare skin of his arms and neck.

Maybe it was already too late. He pulled himself through the improvised doorway and into the open Air.

He looked back into the ward. Deni Maxx was making her way back into the chaos of patients and helpers, her face set. Already she’d dismissed his warning. Forgotten it, probably. But Farr still lingered close to the doorway; he looked back into the ward, apparently torn.

Well, Deni was lost; but not Farr. Not yet.

Adda grabbed Farr by the hair and, with all his remaining strength, hauled the boy backward out of the Hospital and hurled him into the Air. Farr came to rest in the empty Air, struggling; he looked like some stranded insect, dwarfed by the immense, wounded face of the City. He glared at Adda. “You had no right to do that.”

“I know. I know. You’ll just have to hate me, Farr. Now Wave, damn you; Wave as hard as you’ve ever Waved in your life!”

There was a glow from the North, a deep, ominous red glow from all around the sky. It was a light Adda had never seen before. It soaked the Mantle in a darkness in which the starbreakers of the Xeelee glowed like opened-up logs.

Another shout of tearing wood and failing Corestuff was wrenched from the guts of the City. The Skin rippled; waves perhaps a micron high spread over its surface, and the wood broke open in tiny explosions.

Adda dropped his head and kicked at the seething Air, Waving away from Parz as hard as he could.

The Ring was reduced by distance to a sparkling jewel, lovely and fragile.

“I believed most of it,” Dura said slowly, “most of the stories my father told me… But I don’t think I ever quite believed in the Ring itself.”

Bolder’s Ring, the greatest engineering construct in the universe. So massive — rotating so rapidly — that it had ripped a hole in space itself.

“The Ring is a doorway in the universe, a way for the Xeelee to escape their unknown foe,” she told Hork.

His fists clenched; dwarfed by the huge sky around him, his belligerence looked absurd. “I know your legends. But what foe?” He crowded close to Karen Macrae and drove his fist into the cloud of jostling cubes which comprised her face. His hand passed through, apparently unaffected. “What foe, damn you?”

Slowly Karen Macrae began to talk, the globes in her eyecups glinting. She spoke hesitantly, in fragments.

The Star was spawned in a galaxy, a disc of a hundred billion stars. It was actually ancient, the cooling remnant of an immense explosion which had driven away much of a massive star’s bulk and devastated the gray companion which still accompanied it. As time wore on the Star had drawn material from the companion, knitted gas into planets.

Then the Ur-humans came.

They downloaded the Colonists — images of themselves — into the Core; and the Colonists built the first Star-humans.

For five centuries the Colonists and the Star-humans worked together. Huge engines — discontinuity drives, Karen called them — were built at the North Pole of the Star. Teams of Star-humans wielded mighty devices under the instruction of the Colonists.

Hork’s eyes narrowed. “Ah,” he breathed. “So they do need us, these Colonists. We are the hands, the strong arms which built the world…”

The discontinuity drive engines hurled the Star from its birthplace. It soared out of its galaxy and sailed free across space.

The Ring was close to the Star’s native galaxy — so close that light would take no more than ten thousand years to cross the void to the Ring, Karen Macrae said; so close that the immense mass of the Ring was already distorting the galaxy’s structure, pulling it apart. The Star — with its companion, its planets and gas ring, and its precious freight of life — fell across space toward the Ring, glowing in the darkness like a wood-burning torch.

A century passed inside the Star. Thousands of years fluttered by in the universe outside the Crust. (Dura could make nothing of this.)

The Ring neared.

The Colonists grew afraid. The Star-humans grew afraid.

“Why?” Dura demanded. “Why should they fear the Ring? What will happen when we reach it?”

The Colonists retreated into the Core. They had constructed a wonderful virtual world for themselves in there — unreal Earths… And they believed they would be safe there, that they could ride out any disaster which might befall the Star.

The Star-humans were left bereft in the Mantle like abandoned children. They had their wormholes and other gadgets, but without the guidance of the parent-Colonists the devices were like so many gaudy toys.

Resentment grew, displacing fear. The Star-humans determined that they would follow the Colonists into their Core haven if they could — or if not, they would make the complacent Colonists as fearful as themselves.