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“This is your new home,” she said, and stabbed him in the chest.

THREE

THE GARDEN

Just within the fringe of the galactic event horizon—that battlement of gravity where even infinite hyperspace finds its limit—the seedship fell beyond the reality of the universe for the last time. It became, for the last time, its own universe.

This seed-universe, like the larger one it had left, continued to evolve. Over time that had meaning only within its bubble, the seed-universe differentiated and complexified. The flesh between the radiating fins altered, becoming thicker and harder here, softer and more billowy there, as fetal creature-devices coalesced inside wombs that grew themselves just within its thin skin of reality.

In the directionless nonlocation of hyperspace, this seed-universe began its long, long, slow fall toward the center of the galaxy.

Jacen saw Vergere coming: a small agile silhouette in the misty green gloom that passed for night in the Nursery. She hopped deliberately across the luminescent scum-smeared surface of the vonduun crab bog, her attention on her footing as though she scavenged tide pools.

Jacen’s jaw locked.

He looked down again at the wound in the slave’s belly: a long curved gash, not too deep. The slave’s skin was pink, shading angry red at the lips of the wound; the slave shuddered when Jacen pulled the lips apart. The wound was superficial, only seeping blood—he could see soft tallow within, not hard red muscle or the webbed bulge of gut, and he nodded to himself. “You’ll be all right. From now on, stay away from the amphistaff grove.”

“How—how can I?” the slave whined. “What choice do I have?”

“There’s always a choice,” Jacen muttered. He scratched his head: his hair had grown out enough to start to curl. It was caked with greasy dirt, and it itched—though not as much as the thin, patchy teenager’s beard that roughened his cheeks and neck. He glanced back up at Vergere.

She was closer now, weaving through the fungal colony mounds of young oogliths. He hadn’t seen her since his first day in the Nursery. That had been, by his best estimate, weeks ago.

Possibly months.

He teased open the mouth of a bulging sacworm that lay on the ground beside him, and stuck his hand inside. The clip beetles that filled the sacworm’s belly attacked his hand savagely; Jacen waited until twenty or thirty had clamped their mandibles into his skin, then pulled his hand out and let the sacworm’s mouth snap closed once more. The clip beetles bristled like a knobbed insectile glove. He used his beetle-gloved hand to pinch the slave’s belly wound together. With his free hand he tickled the head joint of a clip beetle until its jaws opened; then he pressed the beetle along the wound until its mandibles engaged once more, clipping the wound together. A quick twist of his fingers snapped off the beetle’s body; its head remained in place.

It took twenty-three clip beetles to close the slave’s wound. He gently disengaged the living beetles that still clung to his hand and returned them to the sacworm, then tore strips from the lower edge of the slave’s robeskin to tie around his middle in a makeshift bandage. The robeskin and the strips alike bled milk from their ripped edges: a sticky resinous blood that glued the strips together and healed them in place.

“Try to keep it dry,” Jacen told him quietly. “And don’t go anywhere near the amphistaff grove until it heals. I’m pretty sure they can smell wounds. They’ll cut you to ribbons.”

This amphistaff grove was very different from the one he had found on the worldship at Myrkr; those had been shaped, altered, domesticated. Tamed. The amphistaff grove in the Nursery was the original, the baseline. Nothing about it was tame.

The amphistaff polyps in this grove ranged from one to three meters tall: deep-rooted mounds of leather-fleshed tissue, each with two to five muscular nodules from which sprouted triads of juvenile amphistaffs. Amphistaff polyps are sessile carnivores; the juvenile amphistaffs act as the polyp’s arms and weapons, spearing, envenoming,