Dura said, “Where is the Ur-human Karen Macrae? Is she dead?”
She’s gone. The ship left, once we were established here. I don’t know where she is now… Dura tried to detect emotion in the woman-thing’s voice — was she resentful of the original who had made her, who had thrust her into the Core of the Star? Was she envious? — but the quality of the voice was coarse, too harsh to tell; Dura was reminded of the Speaker system on Toba Mixxax’s Air-car.
The colony of human copies, downloaded into the Core, had devices which interfaced with the physical environment of the Star, the woman-thing told them. They had a system to produce something called exotic matter; they laced the Mantle with wormholes, linking Pole to Pole, and they built a string of beautiful cities.
When they’d finished, the Mantle was like a garden. Clean, empty. Waiting.
Dura sighed. “Then you built us.”
“Yes,” Hork said. “Just as our fractured history tells us. We are made things. Like toys.” He sounded angry, demeaned.
The world had been at peace. There had been no need to struggle to live. There were no Glitches (few, anyway). The downloaded Colonists, still residing in the Core, had been there for the Human Beings like immortal, omniscient parents.
One could Wave from upflux to Pole, through the wormhole transit ways, in a heartbeat.
Hork pushed forward, confronting the woman-thing. “You expected us to come here, to seek you.”
We hoped you would come. We could not come to you.
“Why?” He seemed to be snarling now, Dura thought, unreasonably angry at this ancient, fascinating woman-shell. “Why do you need us now?”
Karen Macrae turned her head. The light-boxes drifted, colliding noiselessly — no, Dura saw, they drifted through each other, as smoothly as if they were made of colored Air.
The Glitches, she said slowly. They are damaging the Core… they are damaging us.
Dura frowned. “Why don’t you stop them?”
We haven’t a physical Interface any more. We withdrew it. Karen’s voice was growing more indistinct, her component blocks larger; the form of a human was gradually being submerged in loss of detail.
Hork pushed himself forward from the cabin wall, his heavy hands outspread against the wood. “Why? Why did you withdraw? You built us, and took away our tools, and abandoned us. You waged war against us; you took our treasures, our heritage. Why? Why?”
Karen turned to him, her mouth open, purple boxes streaming from her coarsely defined lips. She expanded and blurred, the boxes comprising her image swelling.
Hork threw himself at the image. He entered it as if it were no more than Air. He batted at the drifting, crumbling light-boxes with his open palms. “Why did you make us? What purpose did we serve for you here? Why did you abandon us?”
The boxes exploded; Dura quailed from a monstrous, ballooning image of Karen Macrae’s face, of the pale forms infesting her eyecups. There was a soundless concussion, a flood of purple light which filled the cabin before fleeing through the walls of the ship and into the ocean beyond. The human-thing, the simulacrum of Karen Macrae, was gone. Hork twisted in the Air, punching at emptiness in his frustration.
But there were new shadows in the cabin now, blue-green shadows cast by something behind Dura. Something outside the ship. She turned.
The object was a tetrahedron, she recognized immediately; a four-faced framework of glowing blue lines, like fragments of vortex lines. Sheets of gold, rippling, glistened over the faces. The construct was perhaps ten mansheights to a side, and its faces were easily wide enough to permit a ship the size of the “Pig” to pass.
It was a gate. A four-sided gate…
Dura felt like a child again; she found a smile, slow and heavy with wonder, spreading across her face. This was a wormhole Interface, the most precious of all the treasures lost in the Core.
It could be a gateway out of the Star.
She grabbed at Hork’s tunic, wonder flooding out her fear. “Don’t you understand what it means? We’ll be able to travel, to cross the Star in a moment, as we could before the Wars…”
He pushed her away roughly. “Sure. I understand what this means. Karen Macrae can’t stop the Glitches. And so — for the first time since dumping us in the Mantle all those years ago, since leaving us to our fate — she and her Core-infesting friends need us. We — you and I — are going to have to travel through that thing, to wherever it takes us, and stop the Glitches ourselves.”
22
Cris Mixxax climbed onto his board. The wood under his bare feet was polished, warm, familiar; his soles gripped the ridged surface, and the ribs of Corestuff embedded in the wood felt like cold, hard bones. He flexed his knees experimentally. Electron gas hissed around his ankles and toes as the board cut through the flux lines. The Magfield felt springy, solid.
Cris grinned savagely. It felt good. It all felt good. At last this day had come, and it was going to be his.
The sky was a huge diorama, all around him. The South Pole, with its brooding purple heart sunk deep in the Quantum Sea, was almost directly below him; he could feel the massive Polar distortion of the Magfield permeating his body. Above him the Crust seemed close enough to touch, the dangling Crust-trees like shining hairs, immensely detailed; patterns of cultivation showed in rectangular patches of color and texture — sharp, straight-line edges imposed by humans on the vibrant nature of the Star.
The City hovered in the Air over the Pole. Parz was so far below him he could cover it with the palm of his hand, and imagine he was alone in the sky — alone, save for his fellow racers. Parz looked like some elaborate wooden toy, surrounded by its cage of shining anchor-bands and pierced by a hundred orifices from which the green light of wood-lamps seeped, sickly. Sewage cascaded steadily from its underside, around the Spine of the Harbor. He could see the shining bulge that was the Stadium; it clung to the City’s upper lip like a fragile growth, with the Committee Box a colorful balcony over it. Somewhere in there his parents would be watching, he knew — praying for his success, he’d like to think. But perhaps they were wishing he might fail — give up this dream, this distraction of Surfing, and join them in their quiet, constrained lives once more.
He shook his head, staring down on the City as if he were some god, suspended over it. Out here the inwardness, the frustration of his life in and around the City, seemed remote, reduced to the trivial; he felt exalted, able to view it all with compassion, balance. His parents loved him, and they wanted what was best for him — as they saw it. The cries of the race marshals, tiny in the huge, glowing sky, floated to him. Almost time. He glanced around. There were a hundred Surfers, drawn into a rough line across the sky; now they were drawing precisely level, into line with the squads of marshals in their distinctive red uniforms. Cris flicked at his own board, once, twice; he felt it kick at the Magfield and bring him exactly into his place in the line. He stared ahead. He was facing along the direction of the vortex lines, toward the rotation pole; the closest line was a few mansheights from him, and the lines swept around him like the walls of some intangible corridor, beckoning him to infinity.
The challenge of the race was to Surf along the vortex lines, far across the roof of the world — across the Pole — to a finishing cross-section; there another group of marshals marked out an area of the sky, like human spin-spiders. The race was won — not just by the fastest, the first to complete the course — but by whoever applied the most technical skill, the most style in following the course.