Adda stared at the vortex lines for a moment. Were they more tightly packed than usual? He tried to detect a drift through the Air, a presage of another Glitch. But he wasn’t in the open Air — he wasn’t able to smell the changes in the photons, to taste the Air’s disturbance — and he couldn’t be sure there was any change.
The Stadium was thronged with people who swarmed through the Air, hauling themselves over each other and along the ropes and rails strung across the great volume. Even through layers of clearwood, Adda could hear the excited buzz of the crowd; the sound seemed to come in waves of intensity, sparkling with fragments of individual voices — the cry of a baby, the hawking yells of vendors working the crowd. Sewage outlets sprayed streams of clear waste from the shell of the Stadium into the patient Air.
Away from the bulk of the City, acrobats Waved silkily through the Air in a prelude to the Games proper. They were young, lithe, nude, their skins dyed with strong primary colors; with ripples of their legs and arms they spiraled around the vortex lines and dived at each other, grabbing each others’ hands and whirling away on new paths. There must have been a hundred of them, Adda estimated; their dance, chaotic yet obviously carefully choreographed, was like an explosion of young flesh in the Air.
He became aware that Muub was watching him; there was curiosity in the Physician’s shallow eyecups. Adda let his jaw hang open, playing the goggling tourist. “My word,” he said. “What a lot of people.”
Muub threw his head back and laughed. “All right, Adda. Perhaps I deserved that. But you can scarcely blame me for my fascination at your reaction to all this. Such scenes can scarcely have been imaginable to you, in your former life in the upflux.”
Adda gazed around, trying to take in the whole scene as a gestalt — the immense, human construct of the City itself, a thousand people gathered below for a single purpose, the scarcely believable opulence of the courtiers in the Box with their fine clothes and sweetmeats and servants, the acrobats flourishing their limbs through the Air in their huge dance. “Yes, it’s impressive,” he said. He tried to find ways of expressing what he was feeling. “More than impressive. Uplifting, in a way. When humans work together, we can challenge the Star itself. I suppose it’s good to know that not everyone has to scratch a living out of the Air, barely subsisting as the Human Beings do. And yet…”
And yet, why should there be wealth and poverty? The City was a marvelous construct, but it was dwarfed on the scale of the Star — and it was no bigger than an Ur-human’s thumb, probably. But even within its tiny walls there were endless, rigid layers: the courtiers in their Box, walled off from the masses below; the Upside and Downside; and the invisible — yet very real — barriers between the two. Why should it be so? It was as if humans built such places as this with the sole purpose of finding ways to dominate each other.
Muub listened to Adda’s clumsy expression of this. “But it’s inevitable,” he said, his face neutral. “You have to have organization — hierarchy — if you are to run the complex, interlinking systems which sustain a society like the City with its hinterland. And only within such a society can man afford art, science, wisdom — even leisure of the most brutish sort, like these Games. And with hierarchies comes power.” He smiled at Adda, condescending once more. “People aren’t very noble, upfluxer. Look around you. Their darker side will find expression in any situation where they can best each other.”
Adda remembered times in the upflux, when he was young, and the world was less treacherous than it had become of late. He recalled hunting-parties of five or six men and women, utterly immersed in the silence of the Air, their senses open, thrilling to the environment around them. Completely aware and alive, as they worked together.
Muub was an observer, he realized. Believing he was above the rest of mankind, but in fact merely detached. Cold. The only way to live was to be yourself, in the world and in the company of others. The City was like a huge machine designed to stop its citizens doing just that — to alienate. No wonder the young people clambered out of the cargo ports and lived on the Skin, riding on the Air by wit and skill. Seeking life.
The light had changed. The rich yellow of the Air over the Pole seemed brighter. Puzzled, he turned his head toward the upflux.
There was a buzz of anticipation from the Box, answered by a buzz from the Stadium. Muub touched Adda’s arm and pointed upward. “Look. The Surfers. Do you see them?”
The Surfers were a hexagonal array, shining motes scattered across the Air. Even Muub, despite his detachment, seemed thrilled as he stared up, evidently wondering how it would be to ride the flux so high, so far from the City.
But Adda was still troubled by the light change. He scoured the horizon, cursing the distortion of the clearwood wall before him.
Then he saw it.
Far upflux, far to the north, the vortex lines had disappeared.
Its — her — name was Karen Macrae. She had been born in a place called Mars, a thousand years ago.
That’s Earth-standard years, she said. Which are about half of Mars’ years, of course. But they’re the same as your years… We designed your body-clocks to match the standard human metabolic rate, you see, and we got you to count the rhythms of the neutron star so that we have a common language of days, weeks, years… We wanted you to live at the same rate as us, to be able to communicate with us. Karen Macrae hesitated. With them, I mean. With standard humans.
Dura and Hork looked at each other. He hissed, “How much of this do you understand?”
Dura stared at Karen Macrae. The floating image had drifted away from the center of the cabin, now, and seemed to be growing coarser; it was not a single image, in fact, but a kind of mosaic formed by small, jostling cubes of colored light. Dura asked, “Are you an Ur-human?”
Karen Macrae fizzed. A what? Oh, you mean a standard human. No, I’m not. I was, though…
Karen Macrae and five hundred others had come to the Star from — somewhere else. Mars, perhaps, Dura thought. They had established a camp outside the Star. When they’d arrived the Star had been empty of people; there were only the native lifeforms — the pigs, the rays, the spin-spiders and their webs, the Crust-trees.
Karen Macrae had come to populate the Star with people.
The structure of a neutron star is astonishingly rich, whispered Karen Macrae. Do you realize that? I mean, the Core is like a huge, single nucleus — a hypernucleus, laced with twenty-four percent hyperonic matter. And it’s fractal. Do you know what that means? It has structure on all scales, right down to the…
“Please.” Hork held up his hands. “This is a storm of words, conveying — nothing.”
The blocks of Karen’s face jostled like small insects. I am a first-generation Colonist, she said. We established a Virtual environment in the hypernucleus — in the Core. I was downloaded via a tap out of my corpus callosum — downloaded into the environment here, in the Core. Karen Macrae brought veils of skin down over the pulpy, obscene things nestling in her eyecups. Do you understand me?
Hork said slowly, “You are — a copy. Of an Ur-human. Living in the Core.”