“I am. In principle. It’s my turn…”

The tribe’s fifty people lived out most of their lives in the canopy. So Garry Uvarov had instituted a rota, designating folk who had to spend time with him on the floor below. Uvarov raged if the rota was broken, insisting that even the rota itself was older than any human alive, save himself.

“Uvarov sent me up top — to the giant kapok — to see if the stars had changed.”

Spinner grunted; she took a fig herself and ate it whole, like a monkey. She wiped her lips on a leaf. “Why?”

“I don’t know…”

“Then he’s an old fool. And so are you.”

Arrow Maker sighed. “You shouldn’t say things like that, Spinner. Uvarov is an old man — an ancient man. He remembers when the ship was launched, and — ”

“I know, I know.” She picked seeds from her teeth with her little finger. “But he’s also a crazy old man, and getting crazier.”

Arrow Maker decided not to argue. “But whether that’s true or not, we still have to care for him. We can’t let him die. Would you want that?” He searched her face, seeking signs of understanding. “And if you — and your friends — don’t take your turns in the rota — ”

“Which we don’t.”

” — then it means that people like me have to carry more than our fair share.”

Spinner-of-Rope grinned in triumph, her face paint vivid. “So you admit you resent having to tend for that old relic down there.”

“Yes. No.” With a few words she’d made him intensely uncomfortable, as she seemed to manage so often, and so easily. “Oh, I don’t know, Spinner. But we can’t let him die.”

She bit into another fig, and said casually, “Why not?”

“Because he’s a human being who deserves dignity, if nothing else,” he snapped. “And — ”

“And what?”

And, he thought, I’m afraid that if Uvarov is allowed to die, the world will come to an end.

The world was so obviously artificial.

The forest was contained in a box. It was possible to shoot an arrow against the sky. There were holes in the floor, and whole levels — the domain of the Undermen — underneath the world. Hidden machines brought light to the sky-dome each day, caused the rain to fall over the waiting leaves, and pumped the air around the canopy tops. Perhaps there were more subtle machines too, he speculated sometimes, which sustained the little closed world in other ways.

The world must seem huge to Spinner. But it had become small and fragile in Arrow Maker’s eyes, and as he grew older he became increasingly aware of how dependent all the humans of the forest were on mechanisms that were ancient and inaccessible.

If the mechanisms failed, they would all die; to Arrow Maker it was as simple, and as unforgettable, as that.

Garry Uvarov was an old fool in a wheelchair, with no obvious influence on the mechanisms which kept them all alive. And yet, it seemed undoubtedly true that he was indeed as old as he claimed — that he was a thousand years old, as old as the ship itself — that he remembered Earth.

Uvarov was a link with the days of the ship’s construction. Arrow Maker felt, with a deep, superstitious dread, that if Uvarov were to die — if that tangible link to the past were ever broken — then perhaps the ship itself would die, around them.

And then, how could they possibly survive?

He looked at his daughter, troubled, wondering if he would ever be able to explain this to her.

9

Lieserl roused — slowly, fitfully — from her long sleep.

She stirred, irritated; she peered around, blinking her Virtual eyes, trying to understand what had disturbed her. Motion of some kind?

Motion, in this million-degree soup?

Virtual arms folded against her chest, legs tucked beneath her, she floated slowly through the compressed plasma of the radiative zone. Around her, all but unnoticed, high-energy photons performed their complex, million-year dance as they worked their way out of the core toward the surface.

After all this time, she had drifted to within no more than a third of a Solar radius of the center of the Sun itself.

She ran brief diagnostic checks over her remaining data stores. She found more damage, of course; more cumulative depredation by the unceasing hand of entropy. She wondered vaguely how much of her original processing and memory capacity she was left with by now. Ten percent? Less, perhaps?

How would she feel, if she roused herself to full awareness now? She’d never used her full capacity anyway — there was immense redundancy built into the systems — but she would surely be aware of some loss: gaps in her memory, perhaps, or a degradation of her sense of her Virtual body — a numbness, imperfectly realized skin.

Lieserl, she told herself, you’re getting old, all over again. The first human in history to grow old for the second time.

Another first, for the freak lady.

She smiled and snuggled her face closer to her knees. Once, her depth of self awareness and her ability to access huge memory stores had made her the most conscious human — or quasihuman, anyway — in history. So she’d been told.

Well, that couldn’t be true any more.

Always assuming there were still humans left to compare herself against, of course.

Plasma still poured through the faces of the Interface which cradled her ancient, battered data stores; somewhere beyond the Sun, the energy dumped through the refrigerating wormhole must still blaze like a miniature star, perhaps casting its shadows across the photosphere. She knew the wormhole refrigerating link must be operating still, and that the various enhancements the engineers had made to it, as she’d gone far beyond her design envelope in her quest deeper into the Sun, must still be working. After a fashion, anyway.

She knew all that, because if the link wasn’t working, she would be dead.

It was even conceivable that there were still people at the other end of the wormhole, getting useful data out of the link. In fact, she vaguely hoped so, in spite of everything. That had been the point of this expedition in the first place, after all. Just because they no longer chose to speak to her didn’t mean they weren’t there.

Anyway, it scarcely mattered; she’d no intention of waking out of the drowsy half-sleep within which she had whiled away the years — and centuries, and millennia…

But there was that hint of motion again. Something elusive, transient -

It was no more than a shadow, streaking across the rim of her sensorium, barely visible even to her enhanced senses. She tried to turn, to track the elusive ghost; but she was stiff, clumsy, her “limbs” rusty from centuries of abandonment.

The fizzing shadow arced across her vision again, surging along a straight line and out of her sight.

Working with unaccustomed haste, she initiated self-repair routines throughout her system. She analyzed what she’d seen, decomposing the compound image presented to her visually into its underlying component forms.

She felt dimly excited. If she’d been human still, she knew, her heart would be beating faster, and a surge of adrenaline would make her skin tighten, her breathing speed up, her senses become more vivid. For the first time in historic ages she felt impatience with the cocoon of shut-down Virtual senses which swaddled her; it was as if the machinery stopped her from feeling…

She considered the results of her analysis. The image scarcely existed; no wonder it had looked like a ghost to her. It was no more than a faint shadow against the flood of neutrinos from the Solar core, a vague coherence among scintillas of interaction with the slow-moving protons of the plasma…

The shadow she’d seen had been a structure of dark matter. A thing of photinos, orbiting the heart of the Sun.