Cley saw why the Supras had sent no searching birds. Far away quick darts of blue and orange appeared over the Library of Life. In her mind she felt a dim sense of frenzied struggle.

             "The talent," she said. Seeker looked quizzically at her. "I can feel . . . emotion." She remembered Seeker's remark, You have emotions, emotions possess you. What must it be like to not feel those surges? Or did Seeker sense something utterly different? "The Supras are fighting . . . worried . . . afraid."

             "The being above keeps them busy while it searches."

             They moved on quickly. Cley wanted to get over the highest peak and work her way along the broad-shouldered mountains toward where she had lived. She had the image of it all in her head from the flight with Alvin and she felt a powerful urge to return to the familiar.

             When she said this Seeker replied flatly, "They would seek you there in time."

             "So? They'll look everywhere."

             "True," Seeker said, and she thought she had won a small point.

             Seeker sniffed the wind and pointed with its twitching nose. "Come this way."

             "Why?" Her home grounds lay the opposite way.

             "You wished to find Ur-humans."

             "My people?"

             "Not yet."

             "Damn it, I want my kind."

             "This way lies your only hope of eventual community."

             "Seeker, you know what I want," she said plaintively.

             "I know what you need."

             She kicked at a rock, feeling frustrated, confused, exhausted. "And what's that?"

             "You need to come this way."

             They moved at a steady trot. Cley had always been a good runner, but Seeker got ahead without showing signs of effort. When she caught up it had stopped beside a very large tree and was sniffing around the roots. Seeker took its time, moving cautiously, and Cley knew enough by now to let it have its way.

             A large bush nearby gave off an aroma of cooked meat, and Cley watched it uneasily. A small mudskipper rat with an enlarged head came foraging by, smart enough to know that Cley and Seeker were usually no threat to it. It caught the meat smell and slowed, tantalized. The bush popped and spear seeds embedded in the rat. It yelped and scampered away. Another victory for the plants; the rat would carry the seed, nurturing it in return for its narcotic sap, until it died. Then a fresh bush would grow from the rat's body.

             She considered catching the rat for meat, and not incidentally for the narcotic, but Seeker said, "Come."

             Somehow it had opened the side of the tree. This was no surprise to Cley, whose people sheltered in the many trees bioteched for just such use. She entered and soon the bark closed upon them, leaving only a wan phosphorescent glow from the walls to guide them. The tree was hollow. There were vertical compartments connected by ramps and clamplike growths all along the walls. Some creature had nearly filled the compartments with large containers, grainy packages of rough cellulose.

             "Storage," was all Seeker would say in answer to her questions. They climbed up through ten compartments nearly filled with stacks of oblong, crusty containers, until they came to a large vault, completely empty, with a wide transparent wall. Cley thumped it and the heavy, waxy stuff gave with a soft resistance. She watched the still trees outside, all stately cylinders pointing up into a sky that flickered with traceries of quick luminescence.

             This place might be safer; she let herself relax slightly. She took out a knife and gouged the wall. A piece came off with some work and tasted surprisingly good. She ate awhile and Seeker took some. Patches on the walls, ceiling and floor were sticky, without apparent scheme. The compartment smelled of resin and damp wood.

             She chanced to glance out the big window as she chewed and that was why she saw it coming.

             Something like a stick poked down through high clouds, swelling as it approached, so that she saw it was enormously long. Its ribbed sinews were knobbed like the vertebrae of a huge spine. Groans and splitting cracks boomed down so loudly that she could hear them here, inside. Curving as it plunged, the great round stalk speared through the sky like an accusing finger. And, as she watched, the very end of it curved further, like a finger beckoning upward.

             "Time to lie down," Seeker said mildly.

             A sonic boom slammed through the forest. She hastily flattened herself on the resilient green floor of the compartment and gazed up through the big window.

             "It's falling on us!" she cried.

             "Its feat is to forever fall and forever recover."

             "It'll smash these—"

             "Lie still."

             She realized that this was the thin, distant movement she had seen on the horizon from Alvin's flyer. Graphite-dark cords wound across the deep mahogany of the huge, trunklike thing. Fingers of ropy vine unfolded from its tip as it plunged straight downward. The vines flung themselves toward the treetops. Some snagged in the branches there.

             A hard thump ran through their tree.

             She just had time to see the thick vines snatch at the branches of neighboring trees, grip, and tighten.

             The broad nub seemed to hang in air, as if contemplating the green skin of the planet below it and selecting what it liked. It drifted eastward for one heartbeat.

             Heavy acceleration pressed her into the soft floor. They were yanked aloft. Popping strain flooded their compartment with creaks and snaps and low groans.

             Out the window she could see a nearby tree speed ahead. Its roots had curled beneath it, dropping brown clods behind. In another tree, branches sheared off^ where several thick vines had clutched together; it tumbled away to crash into the forest below.

             She could only lie mutely, struggling to breathe, as a flock of tree trunks rose beside them, drawn to the great beckoning finger that now retracted up into the sky with gathering speed. It swept them eastward as trees lashed in air turbulence, as if shaking themselves free of the constraints of dirt and gravity.

             Against the steadily increasing tension the ribbed and polished vines managed to retract. They drew their cargo trees into a snug fitting at the base of the blunt, curving rod.

             "What's . . . it . . ."

             "Pinwheel," Seeker said. "The center rides high in space, and it spins as it orbits. The ends rotate down through the air and kiss the Earth."

             Seeker's calm, melodious voice helped stave off her rising panic. They were tilting as they rose. Cloud banks rushed at them, shrouded the nearby trunks in ghostly white—and shredded away as they shot higher. She glimpsed the underside of the pinwheel itself, where corded bunches of wiry strands held the vines in place.

             "We spin against Earth's pull, but will slip free."

             Seeker's words gave her an image of an enormous rod which slowly dipped down into the planet's air, one tip touching the surface at the same moment that the other end was farthest out in space. Such a vast thing would be far longer than the thickness of Earth's air itself, a creation like a small, slender world unto itself.