ancient foes reuniting again sent it into a rage, a malevolence so strong that it exerted itself supremely. And forced its exit."

             They sat silently for a long moment. The inky recesses of the Leviathan were unrelieved by the distant promise of stars.

             Cley said finally, "You didn't know. All the lore of Diaspar did not warn you."

             He smiled mirthlessly. "But I did it. All the same."

             Cley said, "That Empire might have troubled their mighty selves to make a jail that held."

             Alvin shook his head. "There is none better in this space-time."

             "Well, damn it, at least they shouldn't have just left it as a problem to be solved by us. "

             Seeker lifted its snout, seeming to listen to something far away. Then it said, ""Shoulds and mights are of no consequence. The problem has arrived."

36

             In the end it was like nothing she had expected or feared.

             She lay in a comfortable vine mat in the Leviathan, alone, eyes closed. She felt nothing of it, or of her body.

             The struggle raged red through landscapes of her mind.

             The link with the Supras smoothed the harsh, glancing edges. Still, the cauldron of sensations was only a fragment of the broadening perspectives which opened for her in the hours and then days of the conflict.

             She had anticipated great flares of phosphorescent energy, climactic storms of magnetic violence. There were some, but these were merely sideshow illuminations dancing around the major conflict hke heat lightning on a far horizon.

             For Cley the struggle called upon her kinesthetic senses—overloaded and strained and fractured, splitting her into shards of disembodied perception. This was all she was capable of grasping.

             Yet each splinter was intensely vibrant, encompassing.

             She felt herself running, once. The pleasant heady rush of sliding muscles, of speed-shot perspectives dwindling, of slick velocities— and then she was in cold inky oblivion, her sun blocked by moving mountains. These moist shadows coiled with acrid odors. Harsh, abrasive air thrust up her nostrils.

             The ground—like a plain of lead-gray ball bearings—slid by below her invisible feet, tossing like a storm-streaked, grainy sea. Sweet tastes swarmed up her sinuses, burst wetly green—and she tumbled into another bath of rushing impressions. Of receding depths. And then of oily forces working across her skin. It went on and on, a riverrun she could not stanch or fathom.

             But at times she did sense pale immensities working at great distances, like icebergs emerging from a hurricane-racked ocean.

             Dimly she caught shreds of a childlike mind, incomparably large, and recognized Vanamonde. It had prowled the solar system, she saw, blunting the attacks of the Mad Mind. She owed it her life, for surely the Mind would otherwise have found her on her outward voyage.

             Beneath the ragged waves that washed her she felt infinitesimal currents, tiny piping voices. She recognized these as the recently grown Ur-humans, unformed personalities speckled by dots of kinesthetic tension.

             They were all like elemental units in an enormous circuit, serving as components which relayed messages and forces they could no more recognize than a copper wire knows what an electron is.

             And Seeker was there. Not the Seeker she knew, but something strange and many-footed, immense, running with timeless grace over the seamless gray plain.

             Or was it many Seekers?—the entire species, a kind which had come long after the Ur-humans and yet was equally ancient now, a race which had strived and lost and strived again, endured and gone on silently, peering forward with a hollow barking laugh, still powerful and always asking as life must, and still dangerous and still coming.

             And something more.

             Seeker. It was engaged somehow at levels she could only glimpse. Seeker struggled in what seemed to Cley to be a crystal sphere— luminous, living. Yet the mote glaring at the sphere's center was a star.

             She felt the plasma beings then. Nets of fields and ionized gas slipped fishlike through blackness. They converged on the Jove system. Great slow-twisting blue lightning worked through the orbiting rafts of life there. The mere backwash of this passing struggle scorched broad carpets of spacelife. Lances ruptured beings the size of whole worlds.

             The biting pain of it made Cley twist and scream. Her eyes opened once to find her fingernails embedded in her palms, crimson blood streaking her arms. But she could not stop.

             Her eyes squeezed shut against her will. A swelling seized her. She felt herself extended, warping the space around her as though she were herself a giant sun, bending rays of light.

             She knew this meant she had somehow been incorporated into Vanamonde. But instantly another presence lapped at her mind. She felt herself tucked up into a cranny, snug—then yanked out, spilling into hot, inky murk.

             The Mad Mind had her. It squeezed, as though she were moist fruit and would spit out seeds.

             —an orange, crusty with age, browned and pitted, covered by white maggots sucking at the inner wealth.—

             She saw this suddenly. Her mouth watered. She had to cleanse the slimy maggots before she could eat. She sent down fire and washed the orange in burnt-gold flame. Screaming, the maggots burst open.

             —and the orange was a planet.—

             Seared and pure and wiped free of the very atmosphere which had sustained the soft maggots.

             —and the maggots, singed to oblivion—

             They had been four-footed, scaly, quick of mind. But not quick enough. They had barely comprehended what rushed at them out of the maw at the center of the galaxy.

             Cley was the orange and then the fire and then the maggots and then, with long strangled gasps, the fire again.

             It was good to be the fire. Good to leap and fry and crackle and leap again.

             Better by far than to crawl and mew and suck and shit and die.

             Better, yes, to float and stream and tingle with blue-white fires. To hang in curtains between the stars and be greater than any sun that had ever flared. To roar at the jeweled stars.

             Better to know and shimmer and reek. To rasp against the puny clots of knotted magnetic fields, butt into their slow waltzes. To jab and hurt and keep on hurting when the magnetic kernels had ground beneath you, broken, were dust.

             Better to be a moving appetite again, an intelligence bigger than solar systems. Pleasure seethed in its self-stink, more raw and muscular with every gathering moment.

             —and she broke away from it for a moment, into what seemed to be cool open space, empty of the skittering violence.—

             Ah, she thought with buoyant relief.

             But it was merely another part of the Mad Mind. Oily and slick and snakelike, it slid itself over her. Into her ears. Up her vagina. Deep, deep probing for her ovaries. Down her throat, prodding with a fluid insistence.

             A stench rose and bit into her. Its sharp beak cut and that was when she understood a flicker of what the outside struggle was about.

             She suddenly knew that she now could feel abstractions. The partition between thought and sensation, so fundamental to being human, was blown to tatters by the Mind's mad gale.