They sprawled in a tangle of arms and legs, like beetles swept into
a jar. Someone stepped on his shoulder and swarmed up the spidery
ladder. The turret hatch banged shut. At the front of the floater
Oosik snapped, "Faster, Sergeant!"
"We're getting a vector now, sir."
Silk tried to apologize, to tug Hyacinth's scarlet skirt (about
which Hyacinth herself seemed to care not a cardbit) over her
thighs, and to stand in a space in which he could not possibly have
stood upright, all at once. Nothing succeeded.
Something struck the floater like a sledge, sending it yawing into
something else solid; it rolled and plunged and righted itself, its
straining engine roaring like a wounded bull. Reeking of fish, a wisp
of oily black smoke writhed through the compartment.
"_Faster!_" Oosik shouted.
The turret gun spoke as if in response, a clatter that went on and
on, as though the turret gunner were intent on massacring the whole
city.
Scrambling across Xiphias and the surgeon, Silk peered over
Oosik's shoulder. Fiery red letters danced across his glass:
<font size=2>VECTOR UNACCEPTABLE</font>.
Something banged the slanted foredeck above their heads, and
the thunder of the engine rose to a deafening crescendo; Silk felt
that he had been jerked backwards.
Abruptly, their motion changed.
The floater no longer rocked or raced. The noise of the engine
waned until he could distinguish the high-pitched song of the
blowers. It ascended to an agonized scream and faded away. A red
light flared on the instrument panel.
For the second time in a floater, Silk felt that he was truly
floating; it was, he thought, like the uncanny sensation of the
moving room in which he had ridden with Mamelta.
Behind him, Hyacinth gasped. A strangely-shaped object had
risen from Oosik's side. Before Silk recognized it, it had completed
a leisurely quarter revolution, scarcely a span in front of his nose. It
was a large needler, similar to the one in his own waistband; and it
had bobbed up like a cork, unimpelled, from Oosik's holster.
"Look! Look! They're picking us up!" Hyacinth's full breasts
pressed his back as she stared at the glass.
He plucked Oosik's needler out of the air and returned it to its
holster. When he looked at the glass again, it showed a sprawling
pattern of crooked lines, enlivened here and there by crimson
sparks. It looked, he decided, like a city in the skylands, except that
it seemed much closer. Intrigued, he undogged the hatcheover over
Oosik's seat and threw it back. As he completed the motion, both
his feet left the floor; he snatched at the hatch dog, missed it by a
finger, and drifted up like Oosik's needler until someone inside
caught his foot.
The pattern he had seen in the glass was spread before him
without limit here: a twilit skyland city, ringed by sunbright brown
fields and huddled villages; and to one side, a silver mirror anchored
by a winding, dun-colored thread Oreb fluttered from his shoulder
as he gaped and disappeared into the twilight.
"We're flying." Incredulity and dismay turned the words to a sigh
that dwindled with the black bird. Silk coughed, spat congealed
blood, and tried again. "We are flying upside down. I see Viron and
the lake, even the road to the lake."
Quetzal spoke from inside the floater. "Look behind us, Patera
Calde."
They were nearer now, so near that the vast dark belly of the
thing roofed out the sky. Beneath it, suspended by cables that
appeared no thicker than gossamer, dangled a structure like a boat
with many short oars; Silk's lungs had filled and emptied before he
realized that the oars were the barrels of guns, and half a minute
crept by before he made out the blood-red triangle on its bottom.
"Your Cognizance..."
"You don't understand why they're not shooting at us." Quetzal
shook himself. "I imagine it's only that they haven't noticed us yet.
A wind is forcing them to hold their airship parallel to the sun, so
they're peering down at a dark city. At the moment our floater's
presenting its narrowest aspect to them. But we're turning, and soon
they'll be looking straight down at us. Let's duck inside and shut the
hatch."
The glass showed Lake Limna now. Watching its shoreline creep
from one corner to the other, Silk thought of Oosik's needler; their
floater seemed to be tumbling through the sky in the same dilatory
fashion.
Clinging to him, Hyacinth whispered, "You're not afraid at all,
are you? Are we up terribly high?" She trembled.
"Of course I am; when I was out there, I was terrified." He
examined his emotional state. "I'm still badly frightened; but
thinking about what's happening--how it can possibly have come
about except by a miracle--keeps my mind off my fear." Watching
the glass, he tried to describe the airship.
"Pulling us up, lad! That's what she said! Think we could cut it?"
"There's nothing to cut; if there were, they'd know where we were
and shoot us, I believe. This is something else. Was it you who held
my foot, by the way? Thank you."
Xiphias shook his head and indicated the surgeon.
"Thank you," Silk repeated. "Thank you very much indeed,
Doctor." He grasped the operator's shoulder. "You said we were
getting a vector. Exactly what does that mean?"
"It's a message you get if you float too fast, My Calde, either north
or south. You're supposed to slow down. The monitor's supposed to
make you if you don't, but that doesn't work any more on this
floater."
"I see." Silk nodded, encouragingly he hoped. "Why are you
supposed to slow down?"
Oosik put in, "Going too fast north makes you feel as if someone
were shoveling sand on you. It is not good for you, and makes
everyone in the floater slow to react. Going south too fast makes
you giddy. It feels like swimming."
Almost too softly to be heard, Quetzal inquired, "Do you know
the shape of the whorl, Patera Calde?"
"The whorl? Why, it's cylindrical, Your Cognizance."
"Are we on the outside of the cylinder, Patera Calde? Or on the
inside?"
"We're inside, Your Cognizance. If we were outside, we'd fall
off."
"Exactly. What is it that holds us down? What makes a book fall if
you drop it?"
"I can't remember the name, Your Cognizance," Silk said, "but it's
the tendency that keeps a stone in a sling until it is thrown."
Hyacinth had released him; now her hand found his, and he
squeezed it. "As long as the boy keeps twirling his sling, the stone in
it can't fall out. The Whorl turns--I see! If the stone were a--a
mouse and the mouse ran in the direction the sling was going, it
would be held in place more securely, as though the sling were being
twirled faster. But if the mouse were to run the other way, it would
be as if the sling weren't twirling fast enough. It would fall out."
"Gunner!" Oosik was staring at the glass. "Your gun should bear."
As he flicked off his own buzz gun's safety, the red triangle crept
into view.
"Trivigaunte," Hyacinth whispered. "Sphigx won't let them make
pictures of anything. That mark's on their flag."
Auk stood, unable for a moment to recall where he was or why he