I beeped a few times on my belt communicator, just to let them know I was there, when a soft, familiar voice behind me said, “What are you doing that for?”
I avoided the impulse to whirl — and perhaps tear loose from my position. The voice chuckled, and I tried to look over my shoulder. “Every time I come here, Ralf tells me you know I’m here as soon as I leave gravity; but just in case, I like to let somebody know. I haven’t got time to stand around on one leg all day.”
The voice chuckled again.
“That is you, Timme?” I was turning slowly; and he, who could maneuver five times as fast as I could, was keeping out of my field of vision.
“Here I am,” he said.
I turned quickly the other way and he was floating in front of me, still chuckling.
Timme is maybe seventeen or eighteen. He’s a dark boy, his hair uncut, black, his clothes nondescript rags. Timme is missing an arm and his left sleeve is just knotted at his shoulder. “You want to go to Ralf’s?”
“That’s what I came here for.”
“Aye, aye, Captain Lee.” He nodded slightly with his vaguely mocking smile.
With his one hand he untied a coil of rope from his waist and threw me an end. I made a loop in it, slipped it around my back and under my arms, and held on in front.
Timme looped the rope a couple of times around his wrist — which always struck me as a trifle insecure — and said, “Kick free!” I let go my hold with my boot. “We go that way,” he said, pointing off between two large columns with a ten-foot space between them; then, crouching like a frog, he leapt off from the housing — in the entirely wrong direction! This is the thing that always confuses me about free-fall traveclass="underline" how can they calculate the whole business? The rope went taut, I was pulled along (nearly three times as fast as I’d ever dare go myself), but when Timme reached the end, the rope made him swing around, and our whole trajectory changed. The two of us on the ends of the rope were a complex rather than a simple weight, and together we were spiraling directly toward the space between the bars.
The trip into the web probably beats what our ancestors called a roller-coaster ride hands down. Every five or six seconds Timme would kick off from another plate or strut, and we would shoot in another direction.
Then we were in the clear again. Rotating before us was the Ring. Amidst the confusion of the web, a circular path three hundred feet in diameter had been discovered that would admit objects throughout its circumference of thirty or forty feet. In it the One-Eyes had constructed a metal ring, rotated by the City’s excess power, on which were attached small dwellings where four fifths normal gravity was maintained. The houses themselves, terribly flimsy contraptions that occasionally broke loose and caused a bit of damage, flung out like seats in the old pictures of a Ferris wheel. I’m sure boarding a moving train was no more difficult than getting into the Ring. I always did it with my eyes closed and simply let myself be pulled.
Timme launched himself toward the whirling sheet-metal shacks, and I held on and closed my eyes. A moment later I was hauled, pulled, pushed into gravity again. In general the One-Eyes, even those who are physically deformed like Timme, have developed a physical dexterity that leaves the less adventurous majority of the City’s population aghast. I’m sure that’s one reason for so much of the fear.
When I opened my eyes, Timme was closing the trapdoor. I was sitting on the floor, and Merril was standing over me, saying, “Well, Captain Lee, what brings you here this evening?”
“I wanted to talk to you and Ralf about a number of things. Do you know about the desert we’ve entered?”
She gave me her hand as I stood up. “Yes. But there’s nothing that can be done. Would you have come all the way out here just to tell us something our instruments show as well as yours?” There was the same slightly mocking tone that Timme used.
“There’s more than that,” I said. “Is Ralf here?”
Merril nodded. The two of them, Ralf and Merril, were more or less the leaders of the One-Eyes, though the fabric of their society was so amorphous, vertically and horizontally, that perhaps the term was too — precise.
“Come with me,” she said. “He got your beeps; we were expecting you.”
We went down a low-ceilinged corridor. Through a window, light from outside shifted across the far wall to remind us of the whirling frame we were on. As we stepped into the next room, Ralf looked up from his desk, smiled, and rose.
“Captain Leela, what can I do for you?”
We were in an informal office with a few filing cabinets along the walls. Two paintings hung in the office. One was Assumption of the Virgin by the old earth painter Titian. The other was done by a second-generation artist of the City: abstract, troubling darknesses lapping one another, full of blacks and greens.
“What can you do for me?” I asked. “Talk to me like intelligent people, in sentences I can put in logical order. Maybe even say a few funny things about the more ludicrous stupidities of the City, maybe drop some advice my way.”
“Is it that bad?”
I sat down in the hammock suspended across the office. Merril took a seat near the filing cabinet. Timme, I saw, had sat quietly in a corner on the floor, though nobody had invited him to stay. But then, neither Ralf nor Merril seemed to want him to go, either.
“While I was coming here, I ran into Judge Cartrite. He suggested that the official staff start attending the rituals. Hell, it’s all I can do to keep them away now.”
“What do the rituals do?” Timme asked from the corner.
“Fortunately you’ll never have to be bothered with them,” Ralf told him. “That’s one of the advantages of living out here with us. You came here when you were only three. But some of us who took a little longer to get here know a little too much about what they do.”
Timme — Ralf told me this last time I visited him — had fallen into the web as a child and floated around for more than thirty hours before he was discovered. He had eventually been sucked to one of the great ventilator ducts that drew in air at seventy miles an hour. His arm had been squeezed between two grill blades and chewed off by the fan above his elbow. Instead of sending him back to be persecuted by the Norm, which was going through a particularly rigid enforcement on children that year, they kept him among the One-Eyes and nursed him back to health.
“A lot of people get together and do perfectly meaningless things for hours at a time, for which impossible reasons have been calculated: standing on their heads for five minutes in the corner and then drinking a glass of pink-colored water seventeen times in succession, in honor of the seventeen times an hour the Poolroom revolves to maintain gravity, and the pink liquid in honor of the red shift of Sol — ”
Timme laughed. “No, I know what they do, or some of the things. But I mean, what do they do it for?”
“Damned if I know,” I said.
“Is that true?” asked Merril.