He pushed on, happily certain in his warm euphoric glow of mounting expectancy that what he had done to the ship made him—and his new-found paradise with him—secure.
He had almost forgotten who they were; the pale half-memories that drifted through his mind touched his consciousness lightly and without urgency, arousing neither alarm nor interest.
The dusk grew steadily deeper, but the dimming of vision did not matter.
Nothing mattered but the fulfillment to come.
Far above him, the lacy network of bridging, at one time so baffling, arched and vanished in airy grace into the colored mists. To right and left, other arms of the aerial maze reached out, throwing vague traceries from cliff to cliff across the valley floor. Behind him on the plain he could hear the eternally young people playing about their little blue lake, flitting like gay shadows through the tamarisks and calling to each other in clear elfin voices while they frolicked after the fluttering swarms of great, bright-hued moths.
The crater wall halted him and he stood with the Falakian girl beside him, looking back through the mists and savoring the sweet, quiet mystery of the valley. Motion stirred there; the pair of them laughed like anticipant children when two wide-winged moths swam into sight and floated toward them, eyes glowing like veiled emeralds.
Footsteps followed, disembodied in the dusk.
"It is only Xavier," a voice said. Its mellow uninflection evoked a briefly disturbing memory of a slight gray figure, jointed yet curiously flexible, and a featureless oval of face.
It came out of the mists and halted a dozen yards away, and he saw that it spoke into a metallic box slung over one shoulder.
"He is unharmed," it said. "Directions?"