“I know.” She reached out and touched his arm, feeling the hot tide of Air which superleaked from his clenched muscles. “I know. I’m — sorry.”

He frowned, staring at her, and reached forward, as if to touch her. But he drew the hand back. “Perhaps you’re not as strong as I like to think you are.”

“No,” she said quietly. “Perhaps I’m not.”

“Come,” he said. “We’ll help each other. And we’ll help our people. No one’s dead yet, after all.”

Dura scrambled across the Magfield flux lines to the Net. Men, women and older children were gathered in tight huddles, their thin bodies bumping together as they floated in the turbulent Magfield, laboring at the Net. They cast fearful, distracted glances at the approaching vortex instabilities, and from all around the Net Dura could hear muttered — or shouted — prayer-chants, pleas for the benevolence of the Xeelee.

Watching the Human Beings, Dura realized they were huddling together for comfort, not for efficiency. Rather than working evenly and systematically around the Net, the people were actually impeding each other from working effectively at the dismantling; whole sections of the tangled Net were being left unattended.

Dura’s feeling of depressed helplessness deepened. Perhaps she could help them organize better — act as Logue’s daughter for once, she admonished herself wearily, act as a leader. But as she studied the frightened faces of the Human Beings, the round, staring eyecups of the children, she recognized the weary terror which seemed to be numbing her own reactions.

Maybe huddling and praying was as rational a response as any to this latest disaster.

She twisted in the Air and Waved toward an empty section of Net, keeping well away from Esk and Philas. Logue would have to do the leading; Dura would remain one of the led.

The first of the massive ripples neared the encampment. Feeling the growing tension in the Air, Dura grasped the Net’s sturdy rope and pulled her body against its shuddering bulk.