Universe-as-fruit was not Cleände's metaphor. She spoke of worlds, universes, as if they floated within some mythical, mystical sea, an ocean moved by currents and tides that swept worlds together, drifted them apart, to some pattern incomprehensible to the human mind. Dreams, Cleände said, within the skull of God.

Sometimes the drifting worlds met.

Sometimes they collided, violently; sometimes they drifted together for a time, and parted; sometimes they joined. Her world had drifted for a time within the influence of another —for a long time, Bardo said.

Long enough for the powerful of one world to find away to make the crossing to the other, to Cleände's, where they could do all the things humans might do on a world not their own.

There were wars, Cleände had told them.

There was conquest.