He took one last taste of
the dawn, then flew out beyond their reach.

He flew staunchly and steadily northward, now that he had some plan.
For the clarity of first-sun had told him what he must do. Stopping to
rest along the top of a shallow ridge, he ate part of a darkening
bush-bulb, nearly as large as himself. Its taste was bitter, but it
gave him strength. Then he set out again.

His mind had determined to search the farthest North. Shannon's memory
told him what he might find there: great frozen wastes of ice and
earth, underground hollows left from times when the water had been
greater. Sometimes as he pondered these, at the edge of thought he
would feel a sound, a sensation: deep throbbings in empty places
beneath the ground, a golden light that drew him onward. But then it
would vanish and leave him, wondering. He must find its source, if it
were real.

Three days more he journeyed toward it, till on the fading edge of the
third the wind forced him to land. It had been gathering strength
since the morning of the spire, and now carried with it a bitter and
biting cold that would not rest. His strength beginning at last to
fail him, he determined to go on on foot, until he found some shelter,
or a reason to stop. He felt the presence of no other creature, yet
still he was uneasy. He had reached the edge of the mighty tundra that
formed the cap of Newman's world.

Now more and more he reached into Shannon's past, trying to find the
thing that had kept him going. Genuine physical weakness, other than
simple hunger, thirst and fatigue, was something he had never known,
and dealing with it frustrated all the lessons he had learned as a mai.
Being alien to his experience, he had assumed that it did not
exist---that there was only weakness of will, and that so long as his
desire held, no barrier of the flesh would ever stop him. This lesson
in perspective he accepted, though grudgingly. It seemed that
everything he had known in three seasons of life must be relearned,
altered to fit this new reality. But his will remained undaunted.

He traveled many hours into the darkness of night, until he found a
small hollow of earth and root of stone at the base of a pummeled and
wind torn boulder. A thin lacing of ground-snow, carried by the wind,
swirled around him and whistled in its cracks, making a melancholy
sound that he felt still deeper for the lassitude of his body. Here he
rested, and tried n