You were one of those links I felt, she sent.

             Yes. Those of us here . . . have gathered. We are afraid. His feelings were curiously flat and without fervor.

             You 're like a child.

             I a?n like us. The talent-voice carried no rancor and his face was smooth and unmarked, though that of a full-grown man.

             She looked beyond him and saw a dozen like him, men and women of the same height and body-type. You 're me!

             In a way, he sent mildly.

             From the Ur-humans came a tide of bland assent. They were untouched by time and trouble.

             The struggle, how was it? she asked.

             A woman sent, Such fun! We had never done anything like that.

             "Well, you won't again," Cley said aloud. She preferred the concrete feel of speech to the sensation of dropping stones down a deep well. "But look, what—"

             Then she saw the body. The Ur-humans carried it between them in the light gravity. "Alvin!"

             Seranis followed the corpse, her face stony, body stiff, emitting no talent-trace at all now.

             Cley asked the man, "What happened?"

             "He ... gave ... too much." The man-child's throat sounded raw and unused, as though he had seldom spoken before.

             Cley gazed into Alvin's open eyes. A blue pattern of burst veins gave them the look of small, trapped seas.

             Seranis came last, following the smooth, bland Ur-humans. She said and sent nothing.

             Cley looked at Alvin's troubled, fractured eyes and tried to imagine what he had finally faced. She knew suddenly that he had somehow freed her from the Mad Mind's grip. And his cost had been to have his own mind burned away, the brain itself fused.

             He had dignity in death and she felt a pang of loss. He had been strange but majestic, in his way. Seeker was wrong; the Supras were still essentially human, though she would never be able to define just what that meant.

             In a moment only a heartbeat long she sensed something beyond the kinesthetic effects she had ridden, beyond the explanations she had glimpsed. The coiling complications of ambition, the crazed scheme to tunnel out of their own space-time. . . .

             That was part of it, yes.

             But she remembered the algae mats of earth's first oceans, billions of years ago. They lived on in the guts of animals, bacteria hiding in dark places where chemistry still kindled without oxygen. She recalled that her own tribe had used them as yeasty agents in the brewing of beer. If such bacteria could think, what would it make of the frothy spume of beer? As catalysts they were certainly taking part in processes transcending themselves, yielding benefits they could not imagine. If they could somehow know, they might well feel immeasurably exalted.

             But to those who brewed beer's casual delights, the bacteria were unimaginably far beneath the realm of importance, mere dregs of evolution. And whatever dim perceptions the algae could muster would hardly resemble the true nature of the talk and laughter and argument which swirled through the minds that felt the pleasant effects of that beer.

             Her own understandings of what the past struggle had been about—could they be similar? Valid, perhaps, but dwarfed by the unknowable abyss that separated her species from the purposes of entities enormously removed.

             Could that bear somehow on what Seeker meant about logarithmic time and exponential growth? That she could not even imagine such a gulf?

             The thought caught her for only a single dizzying instant. Then it was gone and she was back in the comfortable, linear progression of events she knew.

             She turned away from the body. The Ur-humans milled uncertainly around her. "Seeker, I . . . these people. My people."

             "So they are," Seeker said noncommitally at her side.

             "Can I have them? I mean, take them back?" She gestured up at the transparent dome where the tired but receptive Earth still spun.

             "Of course. The Supras could not help them."

             "I'll try to bring up just a few of them at first," Cley said cautiously. The enormity of becoming mother to a race struck her. "See how it goes."

             "No one tests the depth of a river with both feet," Seeker said.

             Seranis had gone on, solemn and silent, not looking back. Cley wondered if she would ever see the Supras again.

             The Ur-humans all studied Cley. "Do you think there'll be a place for them?"

             "If you make one."

             "And you?"

             "This is my place." It fanned a greasy claw at the quiet immensities above.

             "The—what did you call it?—system solar?"

             Seeker's ears flexed and changed from cinnamon to burnt yellow. "She gave birth to humankind and is a third as old as the universe itself. She is the source of life everlasting."

             "And you—you're her agent, aren't you?"

             Seeker nodded and laughed. Or at least Cley thought it did. She was never really sure of these things, and perhaps that was for the best.

             "I suppose it's reassuring, being part of something so large."

             Seeker said, "Indeed. Alvin knew of her. But he described her as endless chains of regulatory messages between the worlds, of intricate feedback, and so missed the point."

             "What point?"

             "Alvin saw only metabolism. He missed purpose." Seeker produced another rat and began to eat.

             "Was it 'her'—your system solar—that really destroyed the Mad Mind?"

             "Of course."

             "What about the Supras?"

             "They did as they must. We helped sculpt their uses."

             "Which is it?—'she' did it or 'we' did it?"

             "Both."

             Cley sighed. "Well, did we humans matter at all?"

             "Of course. Though not as you imagine."

             "You helped me because of your biome, didn't you?"

             Seeker seemed to catch the disappointment in her voice. "Truly. But I came to love you. You are an element I had not comprehended."

             To cover her emotions (a very human mannerism, she thought wryly) Cley said lightly, "Just doing my part in the system solar."

             Seeker said with a grave scowl, "As you did."

             "Hey, c'mon, I did have other motives."

             "They were incidental." Seeker lunged at a passing bird, missed, and tumbled into a tangle of vines. Cley laughed. Was this the super-being she had seen roving among the planets during the battle? The same creature that now wrestled with vines, sputtering in irritation? Or was there really a contradiction?

             "This biome—how come you're so loyal to it?"

             "It is the highest form which can evolve from this universe—so far." Seeker kept twisting around in the thick vines to no avail. Even so, it continued in an even, measured tone, "The biome has been implicit in the governing laws since the beginning, and arose here first as intricate networks on ancient Earth."

             "So Alvin had part of it right after all."