Biological diversity demands room for variation, and space had an abundance of sheer volume to offer the first spaceborne organisms. These had sported tough but flexible skins, light and tight, stingy with internal gas and liquids. Evolution used their fresh, weightless geometries to design shrewd alternatives to the simple guts and spines of the Earthborne.

             Cley expected to see fewer of the freeroving spaceforms as the Leviathan glided outward. Instead, the abundance and pace of life quickened. Though sunlight fell with the square of distance from the sun, the available volume rose as the cube. Evolution's blind craft had filled this swelling niche with myriad forms. Spindly, full-sailed, baroquely elegant, they swooped around the Leviathan.

             Her explorations took her into odd portions of the Leviathan, along shallow lakes and even across a shadowy, bowl-shaped desert. She found a chunky iceball the size of a foothill, covered with harvesting animals. The Leviathan had captured this comet nucleus and was paying out its fluid wealth with miserly care.

             She paid a price for her excursions. Humans had not been privileged among species here since well before Diaspar was a dream. Twice she narrowly escaped being a meal for predators which looked very much like animated thornbushes. She found Seeker just where she had left it days before, and the beast tended to her cuts, bites and scratches.

             "Why are you helping me. Seeker After Patterns?" she asked as it licked a cut.

             It took its time answering, concentrating on pressing its nose along a livid slash made by the sharp-leaved bushes. When it looked up, the cut had sealed so well only a hairline mark remained.

             "To strengthen you."

             "Well, it's working. Weightlessness has given me muscles I didn't know I had."

             "Not your body. Your talent."

             She blinked in the pale yellow sunlight that slanted through the bowers. "I was wondering why I keep hearing things. That last thornbush—"

             "You caught its hunt-pleasure."

             "Good thing, too. It was fast."

             "Can you sense any humans now?"

             "No, there aren't. . ." She frowned. "Wait, something . . . Why, it's Hke . . ."

             "Supras."

             "How'd you know?"

             "The time is drawing close."

             "Time for what?"

             "The struggle."

             "You weren't just giving this talent a chance to grow, were you? You're taking me somewhere, too."

             "To Jove."

             "Sure, but I mean . . . oh, I see. That's where it'll happen."

             "Humans have difficulty in understanding that Earth is not important now. The system's center of life is Jove."

             "So the Mad Mind has to win there."

             "There may be no winning."

             "Well, I know what losing will be like." Cley thought of the scorched and mangled bodies of all the people she had ever loved.

             "It is because we do not know what losing would be like that we resist."

             "Really? Look, it stomped on us as if we were bugs."

             "To it, you are."

             "And to you?"

             "Do not insects have many uses? In my view they are far more seemly in the currents of life than, say, just another species of the Chordata."

             "Cor what?"

             "Those who have spinal cords."

             Irked, Cley said, "Well, aren't you just another spinal type?"

             "True enough. I did not say I was more important than you."

             "You compared us Ur-humans— me, since I'm all that's left— with bugs!"

             "With no insects, soon there would be no humans."

             Exasperated, Cley puffed noisily, sending her hair up in a dancing plume. "The Supras sure got along without them, living in Dias-par."

             "The Supras are not of your species."

             "Not human?"

             "Not truly." Seeker finished ministering to her wounds and gave her an affectionate lick.

             Cley eased her blouse gingerly over her cuts. "I have to admit I pretty much felt that way myself."

             "They cannot be true companions to you."

             "They're the only thing left."

             "Perhaps not, after we are done."

             Cley sighed. "I'm just concentrating on avoiding that Mad Mind."

             "It will not care so greatly about you after you have served."

             "Served? Fought, you mean?"

             "Both."

             She felt a light trill streak through her mind. At first she confused it with warbling birdsong, but then she recalled the sensation of blinding, swift thought, conversations whipped to a cyclonic pitch. "Supras. They're coming."

             She felt their presence now as several tiny skittering notes in the back of her mind, mouse-small and bee-quick. "What'll we do?"

             "Nothing."

             "They're getting close."

             "It is time they did."

             Seeker gestured at the intricate whirl of light visible through a high, arching dome above the tangled greenery. Beyond Jupiter's original large moons there now circled rich Mercury and shrunken Saturn. Each was a different hue. But these radiant dabs swam among washes of bright magenta and burnt-gold—single life-forms larger than continents. Seeker had described some of these in far more detail than Cley could follow. They all seemed to be complex variations on the age-old craft of negotiating sunlight and chemicals into beautiful structures. Seeker implied that these were intelligences utterly different from Earthborne kinds, and she struggled with the notion that what appeared to be enormous gardens could harbor minds superior to her own.

             Cley lay back and listened to the steadily strengthening Supra talk. She could not distinguish words, but a thin edge of worry and alarm came through clearly.

             Languidly she dozed and listened and thought. The smears of light that swung throughout the great orbiting disk of Jove reminded her of sea mats formed at the shorelines of ancient Earth. She had learned of them through tribal legend, much of which dealt with the lean perspectives of life.

             Sandwiched between layers of grit and grime, even those earliest life-forms had found a way to make war. Why should matters be different now? Some microbe mat three billion years before had used sunlight to split water, liberating deadly oxygen. They had poisoned their rivals by excreting the gas. The battle had raged across broad beaches bordered by a brown sea. The victorious mats had enjoyed their momentary triumph beneath a pink sky. But this fresh gaseous resource in turn allowed new, more complex life to begin and thrive and eventually drive the algae mats nearly to extinction.

             So it had been with space. Planetary life had leaped into the vast new realm, first using simple machines, and later, deliberately engineered life-forms. The machines had proved to be like the first algae, which excreted oxygen to poison their neighbors. Once begun in space, nothing could stop the deft hand of Darwin from fashioning the human designs into subtler instruments. For a billion years life had teemed and fought and learned amid harsh vacuum and sunlight's glare.