“You’re guessing.” His face was creased with frustration.
She pointed to the room beyond the window. “I think that’s Air out there. I think we could live out there.”
“How can you know that?”
“Of course I can’t know.” Dura felt a calm certainty fill her. She was starting to feel safe, she realized, to trust the powers into whose hands she’d delivered herself. “But why would we be brought to a place which is lethal for us? What would be the point?”
He frowned. “You think this is all — designed? That our journey was meant to be this way, to bring us here?”
“Yes. Since we entered the wormhole we’ve been in the hands of the ancient machines of the Ur-humans. Surely they built their machines to protect us. I think we have to trust them.”
Hork took a deep breath, the fine fabric of his costume scratching over his chest. “You’re saying we should go out there. Shut down the turbine and our magnetic shell — leave the ‘Pig’ and go outside.”
“Why else did we come here?” She smiled. “Anyway, I want to see what those markings on the wall are.”
“All right. If we’re not crushed in the first instant we’ll know you’re right.” The decision made, his manner was brisk and pragmatic. “And I guess the pigs need a rest anyway.”
“Yes,” Dura said. “I believe they do.”
Hork turned to his control console and threw switches. Dura tended to the pigs, providing them with healthy handfuls of leaves. As they fed, their flight-farts died to a trickle and the turbine slowed with a weary whirr.
The cabin fell silent, for the first time since the departure from Parz.
Hork whispered, “It’s gone. Our magnetic field. It’s shut down.”
For a moment Hork and Dura stared at each other. Dura’s heart pounded and she found it impossible to take a breath.
Nothing had changed; the ship still tumbled slowly within the cool gray walls of the wormhole chamber.
Hork grinned. “Well, we’re still alive. You were right, it seems. And now…” He pointed to the hatch in the upper end of the craft. “You first,” he said.
The hatch opened with a soft pop.
Dura winced as gas — Air? — puffed into the ship past her face. She found herself holding her breath. With an effort of will she exhaled, emptying her lungs, and opened her mouth to breathe deeply.
“Are you all right?”
She sighed. “Yes. Yes, I’m fine. It’s Air all right, Hork… We were expected, it seems.” She sniffed. “The Air’s cool — cooler than the ship. And it’s — I don’t know how to describe it — it’s fresh. Clean.” Clean, in comparison to the murky Air of the City to which she’d grown accustomed. When she closed her eyes and drew in the strange Air it was almost like being back with the Human Beings in the upflux.
…Almost. Yet the Air here had a flat, lifeless, artificial quality to it. It was scrubbed clean of scents, she realized slowly.
Hork pushed past her and out into the room beyond. He looked around with fists clenched, aggressively inquisitive, his robe garish against the soft gray light of the walls. Dura, suppressing pangs of fear, followed him away from the wooden ship’s illusory protection.
They hung in the Air of the wormhole chamber. The “Flying Pig” tumbled slowly beside them, a scarred wooden cylinder crude and incongruous within the walls of this finely constructed room.
“If the Ur-human builders could see us now, I wonder what they would say?”
Hork grunted. “Probably, ‘Where have you been all this time?’ ” He Waved experimentally and moved forward a mansheight or so. “Hey. There’s a magnetic field here.”
“Is it the Magfield?”
“I don’t know. I can’t tell. If it is, it’s weaker than I’ve ever felt it before.”
“Maybe it’s artificial… put here to help us move around.”
Hork grinned, his confidence growing visibly. “I think you’re right, Dura. These people really were expecting us, weren’t they?” He looked over his shoulder at the “Pig,” inspecting the ship briskly. He pointed, his embroidered sleeve flapping. “Look at that. We’ve brought a passenger.”
Dura turned. There was something clinging to the side of the craft; it was like a huge, metallic leech, spoiling the clean cylindrical lines of the ship. “It’s Corestuff,” she said. “We’ve brought a Corestuff berg with us, all the way through the wormhole. It must have stuck to our field-bands…”
“Yes,” Hork said. “But by no accident.” He made a mock salute to the lump of Corestuff. “Karen Macrae. So glad you could accompany us!”
“You think she’s in there? In that berg?”
“Why not?” He grinned at her, his eyecups dark with excitement. “It’s possible. Anything’s possible.”
“But why?”
“Because this trip is as important to Karen Macrae as it is to us, my dear.”
Dura flexed her legs; the Waving carried her easily through the Air. She moved away from the hulk of the “Pig” and toward the walls of the chamber. Tentatively she reached out a hand, placed it cautiously on the gray wall material. Beneath her fingers and palm its smooth perfection was unbroken. It was cool to the touch — not uncomfortably so, but a little cooler than her body.
“Dura.” Hork sounded excited; he was inspecting the wall display Dura had seen from within the “Pig.” “Come and look at this.”
Dura Waved briskly to Hork; side by side they stared at the display.
Two circles, differing in size, had been painted on the wall. The larger was colored yellow and was perhaps a micron wide. The color was deepest at the heart of the circle and lightened, becoming almost washed out, as the eye followed the color out to the edge of the circle. The disc was marred by a series of blue threads which swept through its interior — a little like vortex lines, Dura thought, except that these lines did not all run in parallel, and in places even crossed each other.
Each blue line was terminated by a pair of tiny pink tetrahedra, one at each end. Most of the tetrahedra had been gathered into the center of the disc, so that the lines looped around the heavy amber heart of the disc. But five or six of the lines broke free of the knot at the center. One of them terminated at a pole of the disc, just inside its surface. The rest of the lines led, in wavering spirals, out of the disc itself, and crossed the empty space of the intervening wall to the second, smaller circle; a half-dozen tetrahedra jostled within the small circle like insects.
Dura frowned, baffled. “I don’t understand. Perhaps these little tetrahedra have something to do with the wormholes…”
“Of course they do!” Hork’s voice was brisk and confident. “Can’t you see it? It’s a map — a map of the entire Star.” He traced features of the diagram with his fingertip. “Here’s the Crust; and within it — this outermost, lighter band — is the Mantle, which contains the Air we breathe. All the world we know.” His fingertip gouged a path into the heart of the Star image. “These darker sections are the underMantle and the Quantum Sea — and here’s the Core.”
“And the tetrahedra, the threads connecting them…”
“…are maps of the wormholes!” His eyecups were wide and filled with the gray light of the chamber. “Isn’t it obvious, Dura? Look.” He jabbed at the “Core.” “And here are the wormhole Interfaces, brought into the Core by the Colonists after the Core Wars. Most of the Interfaces, anyway. And so the wormhole corridors — marked by these threads — lead nowhere but back to the Core.”
The implications of his words slowly sank into her. “So there are many wormholes — dozens, hundreds — not just the one we traveled in?”
“Yes. Just think of it, Dura; once the wormholes must have riddled the Star.” He shook his head. “Well, the Colonists put a stop to that. Now we’re reduced to crawling around the Star in wooden boxes drawn by Air-pigs.” Again anger, resentment welled in his voice.