Ring

Trapper-of-Frogs came clambering back down the rope toward him; without inhibition she scrambled over his arms and snuggled against his side, a warm, firm bundle of muscle; her shaven patch of scalp was smooth against his cheek. She was no more than four feet tall, and he could feel her bony knees press into his thighs.

“It’s the Pla

He felt confused. “Shooting? But that’s impossible. Why should they?”

She growled, and again he was reminded of a young Spi

He clung to his rope, disoriented. Maybe he should have been prepared for this. Maybe the Pla

But if that was true, what was he supposed to do about it?

Now someone else came clambering up behind him. It was Constancy-of-Purpose, pawing her way across the Deck with her huge, powerful right hand; she clutched something shiny and hard in her left. Those AS-wasted legs, Morrow thought irrelevantly, looked even slimmer than Trapper’s; they clattered against the Deck, pale and useless.

“Morrow.” Constancy-of-Purpose opened her left hand. The object nestling within it was a piton: sharpened, the coarse, planed surfaces of its point glistening in the sourceless light. “This look familiar? The Pla

“But why?”

Constancy-of-Purpose looked exasperated, even amused. “Why hardly matters, does it?”

Trapper punched Morrow in the ribs, lightly; he winced as her small, hard fist dug into the soft flesh. “That’s what I’ve been telling him, too,” she told Constancy-of-Purpose.

“At the moment they’re hitting the Deck behind us,” Constancy-of-Purpose said urgently. “They are shooting over our heads. Maybe they’re trying to find their range. Or maybe they’re just trying to warn us; I don’t know. But as soon as they like, they’ll be able to pick us off… Come on. We have to retreat.”

Morrow, still confused, twisted his head to study the Temple ahead of him.

The building’s tetrahedral form, with its outline of electric blue and triangular faces of golden-brown, was no longer a seamless whole. Windows had been knocked out of the nearest face, leaving black, gaping scars. He saw small figures in those windows: men and women, dressed in the drab, uniform coveralls he’d worn himself for so many centuries.

They were raising bows toward him.

“All right,” he said, wishing only that this were over. “Let’s move out of range. Come on; Constancy-of-Purpose, you lead the way…”

The pod landed close to the stern of the night-dark craft. Spi

Around her waist she’d tied a length of her own rope, and within her suit, suspended on a thread between her breasts, was one of her father’s arrow-heads. She raised her hand to her chest and pressed the glove against the fabric of her suit; the cool metal of the arrow-head dug into her flesh, a comforting and familiar shape. She tried to regulate her breathing, looking for bits of comfort, of stability. Even the gravity here was wrong, of course; and the presence of the heavy suit over her flesh, with Mark’s biostat probes inside, was a constant, scratching irritant.

Louise Ye Armonk walked up to the pod, leaving shallow footprints in the frost of Callisto. The engineer had turned up an interior light behind her faceplate.

“Spi

Spi

The rings of Jupiter arced across the sky, a plain of bloodstained, frozen smoke. The craft lay against the ice, dark, vital.

They drew to a halt perhaps ten feet from the edge of the nearest wing. The wing hovered a few feet above the ice, apparently unsupported; perhaps it was so light it didn’t need support, apart from its join with the central trunk of the ship, Spi

“In form the ship is like a sycamore seed.” Louise glanced across at Spi

Lovely, Louise had said. Well, Spi

“This isn’t a human ship,” she said slowly. “Is it, Louise?”

“No.” Louise set her shoulders. “Damn it,” she said sourly. “We find one reasonably complete artifact in the rubble of the Solar System, and it has to be alien…

“Spi

The leading edge of a sycamore-seed wing was at a level with Louise’s face; now she raised a gloved hand and made as if to pass a fingertip along that edge. Then, thoughtfully, she drew her hand back. “Actually, we wouldn’t advise that you touch anything, unless you have to. This stuff is sharp. The wings, and the rest of the hull, are probably made of Xeelee construction material.”

She ducked her head and sighted along the plane of the wing. Spi

Louise said, “This stuff resists analysis. Uvarov and Mark suggest that the construction material is a sheet of bound nucleons — bound together by the strong nuclear force, I mean, as if this was some immense, spun-out atomic nucleus.

“But I’m not so sure. The density doesn’t seem right, for one thing. I have a theory of my own: that what we’re looking at is something more fundamental. I think the Xeelee have found a way to suppress the Pauli Exclusion Principle, and so have found their way into a whole new regime of matter. Of course the problem with that theory is that there aren’t supposed to be any loopholes in the Exclusion Principle. Well, I guess nobody told the Xeelee about that…”

“How did they make this stuff?”

Louise smiled. “If you believe the old Superet reconstructions, they grew it, from ‘flowers’. Construction material simply sprouted like petals from the flowers, in the presence of radiant energy.

“It would be interesting to know how this ship got here, to Callisto, in the first place,” she said. “Capturing a Xeelee craft must have been a great triumph, for humans of any era.

“Uvarov thinks this moon was used as a lab. This site, remote from the populated colonies, was a workshop — a safe place to study the Xeelee craft. There must have been research facilities here, built around the nightfighter, as the people of the time tried to pry out the secrets of its intrasystem drive, its hyperdrive, the construction material. But we’ve found little evidence of any human occupation, apart from close to this nightfighter. When the war came — ”