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thought it my head—such the sense of pressure and danger, such the need to answer, somehow. And then I realized it came from outside the ship. And then we started rolling, rolling, end on end, accompanied by thuds and pops of hitting something—several some things outside.
    I had time to think of the dimatough trunks, the explosive powerpods. My companion clearly thought of the same, as he let go of me, and said, "Oh, hell."
    And then the lights went very bright, then dark, then normal. Gravity reasserted itself and I fell. I saw my playfellow on the floor, pulling at the lever with both hands.
    So the lever was gravity was it? I'd never seen a ship that could turn gravity off and on that easily and I wondered why. But he wasn't paying any attention to me. Which might be a good time to attack him, only, of course, I wasn't sure I could win. I also didn't know anything else to do. It wasn't like he was just going to forget I'd tried to strangle him. Was he?
    He sat down in his seat, and buckled himself with what seemed to be a reflex motion. He ran his hands along the keyboard, and along a panel next to it, where a series of raised dots shifted places quickly—whether in response to his touch, I didn't know.
    Words still came from him, under his breath, but now they seemed to be more the muttering of someone who is cursing fate. "Can you see the screen?" he asked me. "Can you see anything on the screen?"
    I'd thought we were not on speaking terms, but I squinted at the screen, and could make out, amid the prevailing darkness, some twisting darker lines and some brighter spots. "Pods and trunks?" I asked.
    "So you're not completely stupid," he said. "Can you tell me how to get out of here?"
    "Why . . . why . . ."
    He made a sound on the back of his throat. "Because I'm blind. The flash of light blinded me. Temporarily. My eyes are light sensitive. It's part of my elfing."
    His . . . elfing. Oh, no. I wasn't going to ask. He could be any mythical critter he wanted. I was not going to ask at all.
    He mistook my silence for something else. "Don't even think about it. I can beat you, even blind. Besides, if you don't help me, we're going to run into something and die. As far as I can tell, from my memory of where we were and how we rolled, we're in a cul de sac, surrounded by pods and trunks. How do we get out?"
    I wasn't thinking of anything. I knew he could beat me with his eyes closed. And probably without hands. It was a novel experience, meeting someone who could do this. Aloud I said, "Forward . . . um . . . the way you're facing. At least if the screen is the same orientation we are. Slowly."
    He obeyed, his hands dancing on the keyboard with eerie precision when one realized he couldn't see. We slowly advanced amid the cul the sac of branches. I could now see—well, sort of see, a lot of the screen took guessing—that we were surrounded above and below as well.
    "There's a branch at the end too," I said. "We're going to have to squeeze out."
    He only grunted.
    "Slightly down," I said. "Down, down, down. A little more. Faster than that, damn it."
    And we were in the gullet, we were squeezing out. Squeezing. A scraping sound from outside, a faltering in the sound of motors I hadn't even noticed before, and then the sound picked up again, on a higher note, and a muscle jumped in my . . . captor's jaw.
    But we were out and I directed him: "Up now. Now forward. Now down."
    We wound like a bit of string through the knotted trunks of the powertree ring. The thing is, though it's called a ring, it is no such thing. It is more like a ball of yarn, thick and huge, an artificial satellite the twin of the moon. It might have been a ring in the time of the Mules but for the last two hundred and fifty years it had been fed overtime to feed the ever-larger craving for energy from Earth populations. Add to that the random blowing up and re-seeding of ripe, unharvested pods, and you had . . . a cat's cradle for a