He looked along the line. Ray, he knew, was three places down from him — the only other of his friends to have qualified for the Games this year. There she was, her lithe, bare body coiled over her board, her hair swept back and her teeth shining in a broad, hungry grin. He caught her eye, and she raised a fist, her smile broadening.
The Surfers were all in place now; he saw how they settled over their boards, concentrating, spreading their feet and lifting their arms. The marshals continued to scurry around the line like worried little animals, checking positions, adjusting boards with small pushes and shoves. Silence spread along the line; the marshals were withdrawing. Cris felt his senses open up. The board under his feet, the fizz of the Magfield, the freshness of the Air so far from the womb of the City as it sighed through his mouth and capillaries — these were vital and real things, penetrating his head; he had never felt so alive.
And perhaps, a distant, unwelcome part of him said, he never would again.
Well, if that was to be so — if his life was to be a long-drawn-out anticlimax after this superb moment — then let it be; and let this be his finest time.
The marshals glanced along their line at each other. In unison they raised their right arms — and brought them down with a chop, a cry of “Begin”!
Cris thrust savagely at his board. He felt the Magfield surge through the board and his limbs, dragging at the currents of charged particles there. He lunged forward with a roar, lancing through the Air. The tunnel of vortex lines seemed to explode outward around him; blue-white electron gas sparkled over his body. He was half-aware of similar yells around him, from the rest of the line, but he shut out the other Surfers; he focused on his board, the Magfield, his balance and position in the Air.
The line of marshals, ragged and breaking up, hurtled beneath him.
He opened his mouth and yelled again, incoherent. In his peripheral vision he saw that only Ray, and one or two others, had matched his start. He was in the lead, already ahead of the other Surfers! And he knew his style was good, his balance right; the Magfield surged through his body like a wave of heat. He raised a hand before his face and watched electron gas shower from his fingertips; shrouded in blue light he must look like a figure from a dream racing across the sky…
His board slammed upward, into his feet.
He gasped, almost thrown off the board with the shock. It had been like hitting something solid in the Magfield. He let his knees bend, trying to absorb the upward surge; but still he was hurled up into the Air, balanced perilously on his board. The vortex lines slid down the sky around him, and the Magfield flux lines tore at his stomach and chest as he was dragged brutally across them.
He heard screams from the Surfers around him.
The surge passed. Shaken, his knees and ankles aching, he straightened up. He risked glances to left and right. The line of Surfers was ragged, scattered, broken up. Whatever had caused that surge had hit the others as hard as it had him.
…Ray had gone. He saw a glinting sparkle which might have been her board, turning end over end through the Air; but of the girl herself there was no sign.
He felt a stab of concern — an awful, unfamiliar sense of waste — but the feeling was drowned by a flood of triumph. By luck or skill, or both, he had survived. He was still on his board, still in the race, and still determined to win.
But there was still something wrong. He was drifting downward through the hexagonal array of lines. He corrected his line of flight, pushed himself hard along the Magfield — but again there came that damnable drift downward. He felt confused, disoriented, as if his instincts were betraying him.
…No, he realized slowly; his instincts, his skill, were fine. He was holding his line. The vortex lines themselves were drifting upward, toward the Crust.
He was a City boy, but he knew what that meant.
The Mantle was expelling its rotational momentum. Glitch.
Suddenly, for the first time, he felt lost, vulnerable, alone in the sky. He couldn’t help but cry out, longing to be back in the remote wooden womb of Parz.
He forced himself to concentrate. He wasn’t in any direct danger yet. With luck, and skill, he could still get through this.
Still he pushed across the sky, keeping in line with the drifting vortex lines. But now he slowed a little, glancing around. He was virtually alone now; of the hundred starters in the race, perhaps thirty were still on their boards, paralleling his path through the Air. Of the rest — of the marshals — there was no sign. The City still hung in the Air like a dusty lantern, solid and unperturbed.
The vortex lines were drifting faster. They looked tangled, untidy. Looking more closely he saw instabilities searing along the lines from both upflux and downflux; the huge, complex waveforms passed through each other, seeming to drag and reinforce each other.
He looked over his shoulder at the far upflux. There the Air glowed yellow, empty. No vortex lines at all.
Now purple light flooded up through the Air, sudden, shocking, so that his board cast a shadow over his legs and arms. He leaned over his board, glanced down.
The Quantum Sea had exploded, right under the City; a neutrino fount rose steadily toward Parz, like an immense fist.
Resentment flooded Cris. No, he thought. Not today. Not on my day…
The Magfield surged again, ramming upward into his board with force and immediacy.
I was winning! Oh, I was winning!
Like a fragment of food swimming toward its own consumption, the crude wooden cylinder with its precious cargo of people and animals labored toward the unblemished mouth of the Ur-human artifact.
Dura worked with the Air-pigs, feeding and patiently soothing as their farts drove the turbine. To bring the “Pig” to the wormhole mouth Hork had taken the ship through a long, flat sweep to a position above one facet of the Interface. Through the wide windows she watched the wormhole gate sink briefly into the turgid glimmering of the underMantle, to reemerge as if surfacing as they approached it once more.
Now the Interface rose toward them, like an outstretched hand framed in the clearwood panel set into the base of the ship; within it light flashed, impossibly distant and vortex-line blue.
Hork worked his controls with savagery. For all his outer flippancy in the earlier stages of the voyage, he seemed to have become enraged since the encounter with Karen Macrae. Or perhaps that anger had been there in him all along, Dura thought; perhaps he had always resented the position of humans, left stranded and helpless in this Star. But now, for the first time, he had a focus for that rage: Karen Macrae, and her intangible Colonist companions in the Core of the Star.
Dura wondered at her own composure. She was fearful, yes; and an inner fluidity threatened to overwhelm her as she stared into the approaching maw of the wormhole. But at the same time, she realized, she was not confronting the unknown, as was Hork. The lore of the Human Beings was calm, detailed and analytical. The universe beyond the Star, the universe of the past beyond the here-and-now: those realms were abstract, remote, but they were as real to Dura as the world of Air, pigs, trees. Although she had never seen them she had grown up with the Xeelee and their works, with the artifacts of the Ur-humans, and to her they were no more exotic than the wild Air-boars of the Crust.
Perhaps, in the end, the lore of the Human Beings — their careful, almost obsessive, preservation of apparently useless knowledge from the past — was actually a survival mechanism.