They bleated, their din adding a mournful counterpoint to the shouts and cries of humans; they huddled together at the heart of the Net in a trembling mass of fins, jet orifices and stalks erect with huge, bowl-shaped eyes. A few people had gone inside the Net and were trying to calm the animals, to attach leaders to their pierced fins. But the dismantling of the Net was proceeding slowly and unevenly, Dura saw as she approached, and the herd was a mass of panicky noise, uncoordinated movement.

She heard voices raised in fear and impatience. What had seemed from a little further away to be a reasonably controlled operation was actually little more than a shambles, she realized.

There was something in her peripheral vision — a motion, blue-white and distant… More ripples in the vortex tubes, coming from the distant North: immense, jagged irregularities utterly dwarfing the small instabilities she’d observed so far.

There wasn’t much time.

Logue, her father, hung in the Magfield a little way from the Net. Adda, too old and slow for the urgent work of dismantling the encampment, hovered beside Logue, his thin face twisted, sour. Logue bellowed out orders in his huge baritone, but, Dura could already see, with very little effect on the Human Beings’ coordination. Still Dura had that odd feeling of timelessness, of detachment, and she studied her father as if meeting him for the first time in many weeks. Logue’s hair, plastered against his scalp, was crumpled and yellowed; his face was a mask through which the round, boyish features shared by Farr could still be discerned, obscured by a mat of scars and wrinkles.

As Dura approached, Logue turned to her, his brown eyecups wide, his cheek muscles working. “You took your time,” he growled at her. “Where have you been? You’re needed here. Can’t you see that?”