Alia said, “I’m guessing that ‘Campoc’ is a family name? And so the three of you—”

“Two brothers and a cousin,” Bale said. But he didn’t say which was which. “And I know what you’re thinking. You’ll have trouble telling us apart.”

“Most visitors do,” said Denh.

“But we don’t get too many visitors,” said Seer.

“And don’t worry,” Bale said, “I’ll do most of the talking.”

“That’s a relief.”

In the cluttered cabin, they made a strange collection of disparate human types: the long, elegant frame of Reath, the stubby, hairless Campocs, and Alia with her long arms and golden fur. And yet something united them, Alia thought: a curiosity about each other, a deep genetic kinship.

“So much for the formalities,” Reath said brusquely. He began to shepherd all of them toward the tunnel to the Rustball ship. “Go, go! I’m sure you’ll have much to talk about. As for me I’ve plenty to catch up on here.”

Alia followed the Campocs into their ship. Her luggage trailed after her. Inside, the beetlelike ship was as cramped and unadorned as the outside.

Reath said, “Alia, if you need me, call. But you’ll be fine.”

“We’ll make sure she is,” said Bale.

The shuttle detached itself from Reath’s ship with a noise like a broken kiss, and ducked without fuss into the thick atmosphere of the Rustball.

Alia had never felt so stranded.

On the ground, when she stepped out of the shuttle, the heavy gravity immediately plucked at Alia, and she staggered. The air was thick and hot and smelled of ozone. The clouds overhead were lowering and oppressive. It was like being at the bottom of an ocean; she felt as if she would be crushed. But a couple of moons sailed high, fat matching crescents identical in phase.

Bale was at her side. He took her arm. “Give it a minute,” he whispered. “It will pass.”

So it would. As soon as she had set foot on the planet, the Mist had swarmed into her, through her mouth and nose, and through the pores of her skin. Soon she could feel a subtle tingling in her bones and muscles and lungs, as the pain of existence on the Rustball began to recede.

The Mist lingered on every colonized world. The little creatures who comprised it were neither machine nor living; after half a million years the distinction between biology and technology was meaningless. As she stood here the invisible machines were busily swarming through her body, reinforcing and rebuilding and supplementing, equipping her to cope with the sheer work of survival. Alia didn’t think much about this. The Mist just worked.

The shuttle had landed on an apron of some durable black material, with crimson dust scattered thinly across it. A settlement of some kind clustered at the rim of the apron. Remarkably, the squat buildings seemed to be constructed of sheets of iron. There was dust everywhere, on the ground and on the buildings, even in the air, which had a pale pink hue. The hot air felt dry and prickly, though she suspected precipitation was imminent from those heavy clouds — rain,she thought, digging out the planet-dwellers’ word.

The Campocs were watching her.

Though Alia towered over the Campocs, like an adult among children, these strange little men were not children. There was a calm seriousness about them that was like nothing she had experienced before. It was as if they were listening to voices she couldn’t hear. But then she was here for a purpose: to be made ready for the second stage of her training, the Implication of Unmediated Communication. Though she didn’t yet understand how, these odd little men must have qualities beyond her; they must be at least one step closer to true Transcendence than anybody she had met before.

And beyond that uneasy realization, she thought the three of them seemed calculating as they studied her, as if they had their own purposes for her visit. Bale, especially, stared at her. Bale’s face was like his world, she thought, his nose small, his mouth a colorless line; his eyes, though large and watery, were like waveless pools.

Bale asked, “Do you feel better yet?”

“I think so. She felt uncomfortable to show him weakness, or nervousness. “Are we going to those buildings?”

“Yes—”

“Then let’s do it.” She ran forward, across the apron. To her astonishment she tired within a few paces. She looked back at Bale, baffled.

Gently he told her that she had to learn how to function in a high-gravity field. Here, as on old Earth in fact, gravity was so high that it was actually energetically more efficient to walk, to clump along on one foot after another, than to run. In low gravity it was easier to run, spending most of the time in the air as you paddled across the ground. This struck her as absurd, but she hadn’t had to walk far enough on the water-world to learn this subtle lesson. Bale showed her how to do it, and a few experiments proved he was right.

They walked, then, to the township.

The buildings were just cubes and cylinders, squat and massive as the people who had built them. None of them was large, just collections of a few rooms jammed together. Servitor machines toiled in scraps of garden, bright green amid the predominant rust color. And all the buildings were boxes of iron, mined from the ground.

“Welcome to our home,” Bale said. He pointed at one nondescript building. “That’s where we live, where you will stay.”

Alia had come here to study; she had expected something more formal. “Where’s the seminary?”

“We don’t have a seminary,” Denh said, or maybe Seer.

Bale put a massive fist over his heart. “It’s what’s in here that we’re interested in. Not buildings.”

Alia sighed. “Fine.” She walked forward, trailed by her sluggish baggage, looking for her room. She had to duck to avoid the ceilings.

We flew into Heathrow.

The huge airport was much diminished, as all airports were. Our plane was a gnat flying down onto an immense carpet of tarmac, where once a plane had landed every three minutes, day and night, and now nothing moved but the mice, and the grass in the wind. But on the fringes of the site I glimpsed some construction. The developers were putting up a theme park. Eventually the contents of all Britain’s aviation museums would be emptied out here, Jaguars and Harriers and Tornadoes, venerable World War Two Spitfires and Lancasters and Hurricanes more than a century old but still flying, even a Concorde or two. From the air the old planes looked like birds forever pinned to the ground.

As we made our way through the terminal buildings, and more ferocious security checks by British immigration, Jack Joy approached me. He asked if I’d like to go into London with him; he had a hotel booked, he was sure he could squeeze out another room, maybe we could have a drink or take in a show, and so on. My plan had been just to wait for Tom to fly in — he was due in a couple of days. But now that we had been released from the confines of the plane I was eager to get away from Joy and his “realism.”

And besides, I’d already decided not to stay in London. As I had sat there in the humming quiet of the plane, mulling over past and future, deeper concerns had surfaced. I did take a train into London, but only to cross the city to King’s Cross, one of the big rail terminals for the lines to the north of the country.

I’d decided to go in search of Morag. So I was going to York.

I don’t remember when her visits started.

Maybe she even came when I was very small, a time now lost in the shining mist of childhood memories. She was always just part of my life. I don’t think it was until I was a teenager, thirteen or fourteen, that I realized that other people didn’t have this kind of experience all the time, that it was just me.

When I finally met Morag, I suffered a shock of recognition.