"Thanks," she said in a whisper, her throat still tight.

             Seeker coasted to a light landing near the transparent bubble. "Even a great being can harm in a moment of self-loss."

             "Getting mad, that's self-loss? Funny term."

             "For Leviathan, the pain is of a different quality than you can feel. Never think that you can sense its sacrifice."

             Cley did not know what to say to that. She had seen the terrible damage, the shriveled zones, the creatures which had died as their blood boiled, and worse.

             "Meanwhile," Seeker said in the way it had of changing the subject without notice, "enjoy the view."

             The ruddy disk was much larger now. It was a planet of silver seas and rough brown cloud-shrouded continents. As they approached it rapidly Cley saw that a circle hung over the equator like a belt. It seemed to be held aloft above the atmosphere by great towers.

             These thin stalks were hke the Pinwheel she had ridden, but fixed. Their centers orbited, with feet planted in the soil, while their heads met the great ring that girded the planet. Each tower could remain erect by itself, and perhaps they had stood alone once. Now the ring linked each to the others, making the array steady.

             Leviathan was intended to sweep by the great circle, Seeker told her. Even at this distance Cley could see compartments sliding up and down the towers, connecting the spaceborne to the worldborne. And larger shapes shot along the ring itself, bringing their stores to the tower nearest their eventual destination. This was how the Leviathan and its myriad passengers merged their fortunes with the spreading green surface below. Some towers plunged into the silver seas, while others stood at the summits of enormous mountains.

             "What is this place?" Cley asked.

             "Mars," Seeker answered.

             "What about Venus?"

             Seeker gestured at a blue-white dot. "Nearby. We do not need it now, so I directed the Captain to bring us veering close to Mars. We shall gain momentum, stealing from the planet's hoard, and hasten on."

             "Either we're moving very fast, or these places aren't very far apart."

             "Both. All the ancient worlds are now clustered in a narrow zone around the sun, each finding its comfortable distance from the fire."

             "Looks better off than Earth."

             "True, for no humans have meddled with it for over a billion years. Once it too was desert."

             This Cley flatly refused to believe, for Mars was a carpet of rich convolutions. Without the Supras and their desert-loving robots, she imagined, Earth might have been like this. "Can we live there?"

             "We must pass on. It is too dangerous for us."

             Seeker pointed. Along the ring, filaments of orange and blue twisted. They shot up and down the towers, as though seeking a way in. Cley could make out the texture of the towers now and with surprise saw that they were the same woody layers as the Pin-wheel—indeed, that the entire ring system was a like living, balanced suspension bridge, cantilevered by Mars out into the great abyss of vacuum.

             Cley whispered, "Lightning."

             "It searches," Seeker said.

             She could see magnetic storms rolHng in from beyond Mars, blowing against the ring like surf from an immense ocean. "Can it damage the ring?"

             "It may destroy all of that great creature, if it thinks you are there."

             "The Mad Mind is everywhere!"

             "Spreading, always spreading. When we left Earth it had penetrated sunward only momentarily, and at great cost. Now it hunts amid the worlds. It roves and probes and has even learned to muster packs like the sky sharks."

             "Things are getting worse fast."

             "This is as we wish," Seeker said mildly.

             "Huh? Why?"

             "If it hid among the stars we could ever be sure of its demise."

             Cley shook her head. "You think you can kill it?"

             "Not I."

             "Who can?"

             "Everyone, or no one."

33

             They arced starward.

             The original solar system had been a hostile realm, with all worlds but Earth ranging from the dead to the murderous. Then came the fabled, eon-old reworking. That had left Earth as the nearest child of the sun, Venus next, and then Mars. All were ripe gardens now.

             Beyond Mars lay the true center of the great system, the Jove complex. Its gargantuan hub had once been the planet Jupiter. The swollen, simmering superplanet which now sat at the center of Jove glowed with a wan infrared sunshine of its own. It had fattened itself by gobbling up the masses of ancient Uranus and Neptune. The collisions of those worlds had been one of the spectacular events in human history, though it lay so far in the past now that little record remained, even in Diaspar.

             After its deep atmosphere had calmed, bulging Jupiter's steady glow had warmed the chilly wastes of its moons. Then Saturn, cycled through many near-miss passes around Jupiter, had been stripped of much of its mass. This gauzy bounty was spread among the ancient moons. A shrunken Saturn of cool blue oceans now orbited Jupiter. After all this prodigious gravitational engineering, the Saturnian rings were replaced, and looked exactly like the originals.

             The baked rock of Mercury had arrived then, spun outward from the sun by innumerable kinematic minuets. Light Hquids from Saturn pehed the hardpan plains of Mercury for a thousand years, and now the once barren world swung also around Jupiter, brimming with a curious pink and orange air.

             All this had come about through adroit gravitational encounters consuming millennia. Carefully tuned, each world now harbored some life, though of very different forms. The Jove system hung at the edge of the sun's life zone, Jupiter adding just enough ruddy glow to make all the salvaged mass of the ancient gas giant planets useful. Beyond Jove wove only the orbits of rubble and ice, and further still, comets under cultivation.

             Cley watched with foreboding the approach of the Jove system's grand gavotte. About her the Leviathan regrew itself, but the springlike fervor of its renewal did not lighten her mood. Seeker was of little help; it dozed often and seemed unworried about the coming conflict. To distract herself, she peered from the transparent blisters, trying to fathom the unfolding intricacies outside.

             She had to overcome a habit of thought ingrained in all planet-borne life. Space was not mere emptiness, but the mated assets of energy, matter, and room. Planets, in contrast, were inconvenient sites, important mostly because on their busy surfaces life had begun. After all, unruly atmospheres whip up dust, block sunlight, rust metals, hammer with their winds, overheat and chill. Gravity forced even simple landrovers to use much of their bodies just to stand up. Even airless worlds robbed their surfaces of sunlight half the time. And nothing was negotiable: planets gave a fixed day and night, gravity and atmosphere.

             In contrast, sunlight flooded the weatherless calm of space. Flimsy sheets could collect high-quality energy undimmed by roiling air. Cups could sip from the light brush of particles spewed out by the sun. Asteroids offered mass without gravity's demanding grip. Just as an origin in tidepools did not mean that shallow water was the best place for later life, planets inevitably became backwaters as well.