advantage against the Hideyoshi during the next encounter. However, the Nestbuilders and their symbiotic species, the Slugs, reveal that while she was travelling at high relativistic velocities, the Greenfly terraformers were unleashed around the star Ross 128 (the same star that Diadem orbits in "Glacial"), and have since malfunctioned, destroying the planets there and turning them into trillions of orbiting bio-domes filled with vegetation. The inhabitants of the star system failed to stop them and were apparently killed in the process. Irravel says that she cannot provide any information that would help the Nestbuilders/Slugs, and leaves on the trail of Markarian again. Mirsky dies an old woman in space in 3354. In their last conversation, they discuss the Greenfly, which they observe by now has begun spreading to other systems, destroying the intelligent societies it was designed to provide for. All attempts at containing the swarm have failed. In 4161, Irravel stops at the Pleiades cluster and meets distant descendants of the Conjoiners living amongst a race known as the Islanders, who inhabit the planets in the star cluster. Markarian is still fleeing her. She learns that the Greenflies are now consuming whole star systems at a massive rate, surging outward in a fractal pattern in massive swarming tendril-like waves made of substantial fractions of the mass orbiting each star. She also discovers that herself, Markarian, Mirsky, and Seven, their confrontation having unleashed the Greenfly upon the galaxy, have receded into the mists of prehistory and become mythologised as primordial figures. The Islanders put on a play, in which Irravel (unknown to the Islanders) plays herself in a highly ritualised performance, where it is customary for a human bearing the by-then common ancestral name Irravel to play the character. During the feast later that evening, she tries to tell them that she truly is the same person depicted in the Islanders' play, but they disbelieve her, as many Irravels make such insistences with no particular claim to legitimacy. She leaves the next morning, still in pursuit of Markarian. Eventually, she catches up with the Hideyoshi in AD 9730, by which point the Greenflies have wiped out most of human civilisation. The two ships view this under the effects of heavy time dilation from high above the Galactic Plane (Galactic North), and the two captains discuss the situation. Markarian reveals that they both were involved in a betrayal during that fateful