"They are gone."

             "Fow say that, all-powerful Ahin said that, but I want to look for them."

             "Alvin and his kind are good at a few things. Among them is acquiring information. I believe their search was thorough."

             "They missed me!"

             "Only for a while."

             "You said I could find people like me if I followed you."

             "So I believe."

             "I still want to see for myself!"

             "The price of seeing will be death," Seeker said quietly.

             "We've done fine so far."

             "A numerical series can have many terms yet be finite."

             "But—but—" Cley wanted to express her dismay at being snatched away from everything she knew, but pride forced her to say, "—something in the sky wants to kill me, right? So to get away we go into the sky? Nonsense!"

             "I see you are unsettled." Seeker folded its hands across its belly in a gesture that somehow conveyed contrition. "Still, we must flee as far and as fast as we can."

             "Why we?"

             "You would be helpless without me."

             Cley's mouth twisted, irritation and self-mockery mingling. "Guess so, up here. In the woods we'd be even."

             Seeker said nothing and Cley realized it was being diplomatic. In truth, despite all her experience and skills, Seeker had moved through mixed terrains with an unconscious assurance and craft she envied. "Where do we go, then?"

             "For now, the moon."

             "The ..." She had assumed they were arcing above the Earth but would return to it at some distant point. She knew the Supras went to other worlds, too, but she had never heard of her own kind doing so. ". . . for what?"

             "We must move outward and be careful."

             "To save our skins?"

             "Your skin."

             "Guess you don't have skin, just fur."

             "It does not seek my fur."

             "And who is i/.?"

             Seeker leaned back and arranged itself, all six limbs folded in a comfortable cross-legged posture. It began to speak, soft and melodiously, of times so distant that the very names of their eras had passed away. The great heavy-pelted beast told her of how humanity had met greater intelligences in the vault of stars, and had fallen back, recoiling at the blow to its deepest pride. They had tried to create a higher mentality, and their failure was as vast as their intention. They had made the Mad Mind, a being embodied without need of inscribing patterns on matter. And it had proved malignant beyond measure. Only heroic struggle had managed to capture and restrain the Mad Mind. To cage it firmly had been the work of millions, exhausting lifetimes.

             And still the race had striven on, conjuring up a counter to the Mad Mind named Vanamonde. Both dwelled in the depths of far space. But with that last grand act some light had gone out of humanity. Later species of humans had retreated, letting their machines steal the variety and tang from their world, until only the lights of Diaspar burned in the sands that would one day overwhelm all.

             "Cowardly," Cley said.

             "Vain pride," Seeker said.

             "Why? That makes no sense."

             "To think that humans were the pinnacle of creation?"

             "Oh. I see."

             Cley was subdued for most of the voyage to the moon. She had known a bit of Seeker's story, for it was a tribal fable. But the Mad Mind was older now than the mountains she had roved, a gauzy myth told by the Supras. They spoke, too, of Vanamonde, but that equally tenuous entity was said to be strung among the crush of stars and radiant clouds.

             The moon swam green and opulent as they looped outward. Jonah's slight spin gave an obliging purchase to the outer segments of the great vessel, and Cley ventured with Seeker through verdant labyrinths to watch their approach. The lunar landscape was a jagged creation of sharp mountains and colossal waterfalls. These stark contrasts had been shaped by light elements hauled sunward in comets. A film a few molecules thick sat atop the lunar air, holding in a thick mix of gases. The film had permanent holes allowing spacecraft and spaceborn life access, the whole arrangement kept buoyant by steady replenishment from belching volcanoes. This trap offset the moon's feebler gravitational grasp so well that it lost less of its air than did the Earth.

             The beckoning moon hung nearly directly sunward and so was nearly drowned in shadow until Jonah began to curve toward its far side. For this passing moment the sun, moon and Earth were aligned in geometric perfection, before plunging back along their complicated courses. Cley watched this moment of uncanny, simple equilibrium and felt the paradox that balance and stillness lay at the heart of all change.

             "See," Seeker said. "Storms."

             Cley looked down into the murk and whirl of the bottled lunar air, but the disturbance lay above that sharp division. In the blackness over both poles snaked filaments of blushing orange.

             "Damn." Cley whispered, as though the helical strands could hear. "The Mad Mind?"

             "It probes for us. I had thought it would forage elsewhere first."

             Seeker pointed with its ears at what seemed to Cley to be empty space around Earth. Seeker described how the Earth's magnetic domain is compressed by the wind from the sun, and streams out in the wake. She blinked her eyes up into ultraviolet and caught the delicate shimmer of a huge volume around the planet. She witnessed a province she had never suspected, the realm dominated by the planet's blooming magnetic fields. It was a gossamer ball, crumpled in on the sun side, stretched and shmmed by the wind from the sun into tapering tail. Arcades of momentary fretwork grew and died in the rubbery architecture of the magnetosphere, and she knew that these, too, were the footprints of the Mad Mind. "It's searching there."

             "It relishes the bands of magnetic field," Seeker said somberly. "I hoped it would seek us only in that realm."

             "But it has spread here, too."

             "It must."

             Cley felt a cold shudder. Immense forces lumbered through these colossal spaces, and she was a woman born to pad the quiet paths of sheltered forests, to prune and plant and catch the savor of the sighing wind. This was not her place.

             "It's able to punch through the air blanket?" she asked.

             Seeker simply poked one ear at the lunar south pole. She shifted down into the infrared and saw faint plumes geyser below the hard curve of the atmosphere. Orange sparks worked there.

             "It's already breached the air layer." She bit her lip and nearly lost her hold on a branch.

             "And can hunt and prey at will, once inside. It follows the lunar magnetic-field lines where it wishes." Seeker cast off without warning, kicked against an enormous orchid, and shot down a connecting tube.

             "Hey, wait!"

             She caught up in an ellipsoidal vault where an army of the black spiders was assembling ranks of oval containers. In the dizzying activity she could barely keep up with Seeker. Larger animals shot by her, some big enough to swat her with a single flipper or snap her in two with a beak, but all ignored her. A fever pitch resounded through the noisy blur. Seeker had stopped, though, and was sunning itself just beneath the upper dome.