"I mingled genetic information with it."

             "Oh! I'm sorry, I . . ."

             Seeker kicked at the carcass, which was now attracting a cloud of scavenger mites. "It was an enemy."

             "After you, ah, 'mingled'—? I mean . . ."

             "Before and after."

             "But then why did you—I mean, usually we don't . . ."

             Seeker gave Cley a glance which combined a fierce scowl with a tongue-lolling grin. "We never think of one thing at a time."

             "Even during sex?" Cley laughed. "Do you have children?"

             "Two litters."

             "Seeker! You're female? I never imagined!"

             "Not female as you are."

             "Well, you're certainly not male if you bear litters."

             "Simple sex like yours was a passing adaptation."

             Cley chuckled. "Seeker, sounds like you're missing a lot of fun."

             "Humans are noted as sexual connoisseurs with enlarged organs."

             "Ummmm. I'll take that as a compliment."

             A faint scurrying distracted Cley. She pushed aside a huge fern bough and saw a human shape moving away from them. "Hey!" she called.

             The silhouette looked back and turned away.

             "Hey, stop! I'm friendly."

             But the profile blended into the greens and browns and was gone. Cley ran after it. After blundering along limbs and down trunks she stopped, listening, and heard nothing more than a sigh of breeze and the cooing calls of unknown birds.

             Seeker had followed her. "You wished to mate?"

             "Huh? No, we're not always thinking about that. Is that what you think? I just wanted to talk to him."

             Seeker said, "You will find no one."

             "Who was that? Say, that wasn't an illusion, was it? Like those who killed my tribe and that Alvin said were just images?"

             "No, that was the Captain."

             Cley felt a surge of pride. Humans ran this huge thing.

             "Alvin said my kind was all gone, except for me."

             "They are."

             "So this Captain is some other kind? Supra?"

             "No. I do not think you truly wish to explore such matters. They are immaterial—"

             "Look, I'm alone. If I can find any kind of human, I will."

             Seeker tilted its massive head back, raising and lowering its brow ridges in a way that Cley found vaguely unsettling. "We have other pursuits."

             "If you won't help me, I'll find the Captain myself."

             "Good."

             Cley didn't understand this reply, but she was used to that with Seeker. She grimaced, knowing how hard it would be to find anything in this vast place.

             Seeker said nothing more and seemed to be distracted. They worked their way upward against the light centripetal gravity and finally stood on a broad slope made only of great leaves. Sunlight streamed fierce and golden from an open sky that framed the shrinking moon. Cley knew that when the Earth had come alive, over five billion years ago, it had begun wrapping itself in a membrane it made of tailored air and water, for the general purpose of editing the sun. Buried deep in Earth's forest, she had never bothered to think of other planets, but now she saw that the moon too had learned this skill from Earth. There was something fresh and vibrant about the filmed moon, as though it had not shared the long withering imposed by the Supras' robots. Where once maria meant the dark blotches of volcanic flows, now true seas lapped at rugged mountains with snow-dappled peaks. Now Earth's spreading voracious green seemed to mimic its junior companion in exuberant disequilibrium.

             Seeker bent and pressed an ear against a purple stalk. It nibbled at the young shoots breaking through the slick bark but also seemed to be listening. Then it sat up and said, "We are bound for Venus."

             "What's that?"

             "The planet next out from Earth, second from the sun."

             "Can we live there?"

             "I expect the question will be whether we can avoid death there."

             With that Seeker fell asleep and Cley, wary of the tangled jungle, did not venture away. She watched the Earth and moon shrink, twin planets brimming against the timeless blaze of the galaxy.

             She knew instinctively that the moon was not merely a sheltered greenhouse maintained by constant outside management. Who would tend it, after all? For long eons humankind had been locked into its desert fastnesses. No, the ripeness came from organisms adapting to a material environment which was in turn made by other organisms. To imagine otherwise—as ancient humans had— was to see the world as a game with fixed rules, like human sports, strict and static. Yet even planets had to yield to the press of suns.

             The sun had burned hydrogen for nearly five billion years before Earth evolved a species which could understand that simple fact, and its implications. Fusing hydrogen made helium, a gaseous ash that settled to the sun's core. Helium holds in radiation better than hydrogen and so drove the core temperature higher. In turn hydrogen burned more fiercely. The sun grew hotter. Unlike campfires, solar furnaces blaze brighter as their ash gathers.

             Earthlife had escaped this dead hand of physics ... for a while. Long before humans emerged, a blanket of carbon dioxide had helped warm the Earth. As the sun grew hotter, though, life thinned that blanket to keep a comfortable clime.

             But carbon dioxide was also the medium through which the rich energy of the sun's fusing hydrogen became transmuted into living matter. It was also the fundamental food for photosynthesis. Thinning the carbon dioxide blanket threatened that essential reaction. So a jot of time after the evolution of humans—a mere hundred million years—the air had such skimpy carbon dioxide that all of the plant kingdom was imperiled.

             At that point the biota of Earth could have radically adjusted their chemical rhythms. Other planets had passed through this knothole before and survived. But the intelligences which thronged that era, including the forerunners of Seeker, had intervened.

             Moving the Earth further from the solar furnace would offset the steady banking of the inner fires. This led to the great maneuvers which rearranged the planets, opening them to fresh uses.

             All this lay buried in Diaspar's dusty records and crossed Cley's thoughts only as a filligree of myth. The much-embellished stories her tribe had told around campfires taught such things through parable and grandiose yarns. Her kind were not studious in the strict sense of the term, but their forest crafts had needed an underpinning of sage myth, the "feel" of why and how biospheres were knit and fed. Some lore was even hard-wired in Cley at the level of instinctive comprehension.

             So the cloud-wreathed beauty of the twin worlds made her breath catch, her heart race with a love which was perhaps the hallmark of true intelligence. As Seeker slept she watched specks climb above the sharp-edged air of Luna to meet other dabs in a slow, grand gavotte. Another Jonah approached from Earth. Motes converged on it from eccentric orbits about the moon. She adjusted her eyes to pick out the seeping infrared glow that spoke of internal warmth, and saw a greater cloud, a snapshot of teeming beeswarm wealth. Streamers swung between Earth and moon, endless transactions of species. A thinner rivulet broke away from the figure-eight orbits that linked the twins. It trickled inward and Cley—holding a hand against the sun's glare—saw that it looped toward a thick swarm that clustered about the sun itself.