The taste of her salt skin mingled with the power turning within, and everything loosened, splintered, multiplied.

When they made love, they became each other. She felt his brimming strength, the magnetism in his bones, and she saw herself as if through his eyes backsprawled in a ruffle of grass and horsemint. His eyes closed, and he felt the gorging magic filling him like light, tightening through the lens of his awareness to the burning focus of an orgasm. The resin smell of crushed grass spelled over them.

Solitudes opened, and they rocked back into their own bodies, the sex between them liquid, filling the dark gnarled foot of the tree with a charmed, fleece odor.

Her limbs were straggled, sticky, humming with dreams.

She held to his arms, and the glittering sounds of their bodies and the surge of feeling in the nimbus of their flesh opened her completely to the moment: She felt the slippery green moss floating out of the treeroot beneath her, and the other skyles iced with the Werld light, sun-high, swelling the tree bark, rising the sap.

A claret light sheened among the clouds when they came out of each other. She had seen through him, beyond his adamized body and past life on earth to the cryptic silence in him. Carl didn't know how else to explain it. He felt that they had interpenetrated each

other's souls. They had heard each other's stories-now they, felt each other's inner life.

He remembered the eld skyle telling him about Evoe, and how she would be mated to him by the very molecular nature of his body. And he was at peace. He knew this woman truly loved him just for him. She lay across his warm chest, and the smell of her hair reminded him of rain. How could the eld skyle have known? Was it telepathy, that it had used to select Evoe for him? The moment was too wonderful for him to think that thought through. The light was ripe, the rock shadows somnolent. Later, he would wonder why he had accepted his new life so mindlessly. Several lizardwings flicked through the plum sky like meteors.

They roamed for what seemed a lifetime. The skyles fed them and the fallpath carried them. They, visited clan sites and mingled with the Foke, but they never went to Tarfeather. There was too much else to see for them to return to the moving capital and perhaps provoke Allin and his clan's wizan with the fact of Carl's freedom. They had sentenced him to slavery, though he bore no grudge against them; their rejection, after all, had sent him to Rhene and Evoe. He was not eager' to confront them again.

Among the wet, cloudbroomed skyles in a far corner of the Werld, they met a wizan clan that specialized in Werld knowledge. They were the closest thing to scientists Carl had met among the Foke. They had no hardware, none of the apparatus he associated with science. They were not technicians.

They were, rather, historians, pooling and recording the knowledge of droppings like himself What they learned was preserved in books that they published with their own presses.

Next to food, the written language was adored by the Foke. Everyone read and wrote, and each clan had its own press. Because of the difficulty of obtaining materials, only wizan were freely published. Others had to work hard for the right. Religious tomes and cookbooks were the most common publication. But Foke were also fond of journals and treatises.

Carl and Evoe met the scientific wizan at the Cloudwall.

That was far across the Werld, on the blue side, at the apparent perimeter. The clouds piled up there into a virtual wall that no one had ever penetrated because the Werld literally ended there.

The wizan had gathered in this place not so much to study the Cloudwall as to stay hidden from the zotl. They were compiling a New History of the Werld, and they needed the obscuring mists of the Cloudwall to cover their operation.

Carl was surprised by how much the wizan knew of the universe. The Werld was self-contained, yet generations of contact with droppings dating back to their own origins one hundred and fifty cycles ago had revealed a fairly accurate depiction of the cosmos. They were happy to see Carl, for he spoke their language and could more easily relate what he had learned. There was, however, little he could add to their understanding.

The wizan knew the universe was closing up. They were the last human age; and that knowledge spurred their mystical pursuits: The meaning of life, for the wizan, was meaning itself-the discovery or, when necessary, the invention of meaning.

They believed that ail creation was light and light's gradients, and so all beings, to them, were equal. The Werld was clement enough and big enough to sustain this philosophy. Foke communities made up the rules they chose to live by, and individuals unhappy with the collective -were free to leave and find or start cummunities more to their liking.

The wizan were appalled by Carl's stories of earth:

Old age, .disease, 'prison, and human-slaughtering war were horrors alien to -the Foke way. In the telling, Carl amazed himself at having endured life on earth. Compared to the Werld, even with the zotl and gumper hogs, -earth was a synonym for hell.

Among the wizan, living from meal to meal in their simple routines, unashamed of time, Carl was grateful to be free of his past, all the incomprehensions and indecisions of existing at the ass end of earth's most violent millennium. He was free. He had been delivered from a madness that he had once thought was all there was. And now here he was, in a world of secret places, bonded to a woman he loved. Life was good:

Evoe, too, was caught up in Carl's happiness. Her life since meeting him had been a continuous surprise of feeling.

She had loved before and had reared children, but she had lost them all to zotl and the wild things of the Werld. Death's indirections had long ago liberated her from love-until now.

Black memory faded before the brilliance of her lover's smile.

He made her feel strong with life. His touch pried her loose from herself, and his embrace carried her loneliness. She would die before she would let herself lose him.

Carl and Evoe's time among the sapient and gentle wizan of the Cloudwall left them peaceful and not as guarded as the dangers of the Werld demanded. During their long journeying, they had witnessed both the wonders and the hostilities of the skyles. Sickness was practically unheard-of, as the eld skyle had foretold, and no one aged beyond his full maturity. Yet the Werld's population was relatively scant. The treacheries of the fallpath crippled and killed many Foke all the time. Certain magnetic skyles were renowned for the healing of bones, and Carl had spent

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