He anchored the flier.
He carried her body to the highest point to which a body might becarried.
He placed her there, dressed in her finest garments, a wide scarfconcealing the angle of her neck, a dark veil covering her emptied features.
He was about to try a prayer when the hail began to fall. Like thrownrocks, the chunks of blue ice came down upon him, upon her.
"God damn you!" he cried and he raced back to the flier.
He climbed into the air, circled.
Her garments were flapping in the wind. The hail was a blue, beadedcurtain that separated them from all but these final caresses: fire aflowfrom ice to ice, from clay aflow immortally through guns.
He squeezed the trigger and a doorway into the sun opened in the sideof the mountain that had been nameless. She vanished within it, and hewidened the doorway until he had lowered the mountain.
Then he climbed upward into the cloud, attacking the storm until hisguns were empty.
He circled then above the molten mesa, there at the southeastern edgeof Deadland.
He circled above the first pyre this world had seen.
Then he departed, to sleep for a season in silence the sleep of ice andstone, to inherit the Alyonal. There is no dreaming in that sleep.
Fifteen centuries. Almost half the Wait. Two hundred words orless....Picture--
...Nineteen mighty rivers flowing, but the black seas rippling violetnow.
...No shallow iodine-colored forests. Mighty shag-barked barrel treesinstead, orange and lime and black and tall across the land.
...Great ranges of mountains in the place of hills brown, yellow,white, lavender. Black corkscrews of smoke unwinding from smoldering cones.