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Hork growled and Waved forward. "Talk straight, damn you."
The blurred head rotated slowly.Doppler distortion. Blue shift. You we are traveling enormously
quickly through space. Almost as fast as light itself. Do you see? And so...
"And so we outrun starlight," Hork said. "...I think I understand. But why is it we still see the Star itself,
and its system of ring and giant companion?"
The Colonist seemed to be retreating into her own half-formed head; the fleshy things in her eyecups slid
around like independent animals.
Dura struggled to answer Hork. "Because the Star is traveling with us. And that's why we can still see its
light." She looked at him doubtfully. "Does that make sense?"
Hork growled. "This Colonist and her riddle-talk... All right. Let's assume you're right. After all, we
haven't any better explanation. Let's assume we, and the Star, are traveling through space as fast as light.
Why? Where are we coming from? And where are we going?"
There was no answer from Karen Macrae. Light-cubes crawled over her face like leeches.
Hork and Dura stared at each other, as if seeking the answers in each other's exasperated faces.
They looked around once more, trying to make sense of the distorted sky. Dura felt small, fragile,
helpless in this ensemble of hurtling worlds. There was a symmetry to the smeared light around them, and
after some argument they decided that their departure point and destination must lie at the poles of an
imaginary globe around them, the globe whose equator was marked by the starbow.
Hork reached for the arrow device. "All right. Then let's see if we can see what lies there..." He set the
pointer at its penultimate setting.
The stars fled from the crumbling starbow and back to their scattered homes around the sky.
Hork Waved toward one of the imagined poles, peering through the blocky Ur-human cloud devices
and into space. To Dura, who remained close to Karen Macrae, he looked like a toy, a speck swimming
against the Ur-humans' vague immensities.
"Nothing here," he called at last, sounding disappointed. "Just an anonymous patch of stars."
"Then it must be at the other end of the chamber. The other pole. Come on."
She waited for him to return. Then, hand in hand, they Waved in the Star's direction of flight.
...And therewas something at the pole of the sky: something set against the backdrop of stars, something
huge if diminished by distance and precisely defined.
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Karen Macrae was saying something. The rustling words sighed across the huge silences of the
chamber.
Dura and Hork hurried back and pressed their faces close to the Colonist's cloudy lips. "What is it?"
Dura demanded, almost despairing. "Won't you try again? What are you saying to us?"
...The Ring. Can you see it? I've so little processing power here... hard to... the Ring...
Dura turned away and looked at the artifact; and a fear borne of childhood tales, of old, distorted
legends, welled up in her.

The car sailed away.
Adda hung on to the ward's improvised doorframe and sucked Air into his lungs. He glanced around the
sky. The panorama, now somber and deep yellow, grew less and less like the secure, orderly
Mantlescape he'd grown old with: the vortex lines were discontinuous shreds of spin loops struggling to
reform, and the starbreaker beams continued to cut down through the Air and into the Core, unnaturally
vertical.
Tired as he was, something probed at the edge of his awareness. It seemeddarker than before. Why
should that be? He pushed himself out of the ward and Waved a few weary mansheights into the sky.
Behind him, the Skin was a limitless wooden wall which cut away half of the sky. It was bounded about
by the huge anchor-bands and punctuated by a hundred crude gashes; a slowing trickle of cars and
people still dribbled from the opened-up walls and diffused into the wastes of the Air. The Skin was
dark, intimidating...
Too dark.That was it.
Adda Waved a little further and twisted his head around, surveying the Corestuff anchor-bands. The
huge hoops were like a gray cage over the City's wooden face but they were dull, lifeless, where a little
earlier they had crackled with blue electron gas.
The glow of the gas had gone.
So the dynamos, the huge, wood-burning lungs of the City, had failed at last. Perhaps they had been
abandoned by their attendants; or maybe some essential part of the City's infrastructure had failed under
the strain of holding the City against the fluctuating Magfield.
It scarcely mattered.
There was a sharp explosion. A hail of splinters fanned out from the base of the City, at the junction of
the Spine and the main inhabited section. The splinters sailed away through the showers of sewage
material still falling from the base of Parz.
There might be no more than heartbeats left.
Adda Waved strongly back to the improvised Hospital port and dived into the melee of swaddled
patients, harassed staff and volunteers. He found Farr helping Deni Maxx to fix a patient's bandages. He
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grabbed Farr's and Deni's arms roughly; he hauled them away from the unconscious patient and toward
the exit.
"We've got to get out of here."
Deni stared at him, the deep yellow Air-light scouring shadow-lines in her face. "What is it? I don't
understand."
"The anchor-bands have lost power," Adda hissed. "They can't sustain the City, here above the Pole.
The City's going to drift come under intense stress... We have to get away from here. The City will
never withstand it..."
Farr glanced back to the patients and helpers. "But we're not finished."
"Farr," Adda said with all the persuasiveness he could muster,"it's over. You've done a marvelous job,
but there's nothing more you can do. Once the effects of the band failure hit we won't be able to
complete the evacuation anyway."
Deni Maxx stared into his face, her mouth tight. "I'm not leaving."
Adda felt his scarred old heart break once more.
"But you'll die," he said, hearing a plea in his voice. "These wretched people can never survive anyway.
There's no point..."
She pulled her arm from his grasp. She looked back into the ward, as if all this had been a mere
distraction from her work.
When he placed his hand on the crude doorframe he felt a deep, shuddering vibration, coming from the
very bones of the City, and shivers of turbulence crept across the bare skin of his arms and neck.
Maybe it was already too late. He pulled himself through the improvised doorway and into the open Air.
He looked back into the ward. Deni Maxx was making her way back into the chaos of patients and
helpers, her face set. Already she'd dismissed his warning. Forgotten it, probably. But Farr still lingered
close to the doorway; he looked back into the ward, apparently torn.
Well, Deni was lost; but not Farr. Not yet.
Adda grabbed Farr by the hair and, with all his remaining strength, hauled the boy backward out of the
Hospital and hurled him into the Air. Farr came to rest in the empty Air, struggling; he looked like some
stranded insect, dwarfed by the immense, wounded face of the City. He glared at Adda. "You had no
right to do that." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]