“Do you think we’re still here?” She pointed to the Core of the Star map, at the knot of wormholes which looped around it.
“No,” he said briskly. “Why would we be given an Interface which took us into the Core? Remember, the Colonists have a goal too — they also have to find a way to stop the Glitches. They surely can’t use the wormholes themselves — after all, we know the wormholes were built for humans. Real humans, I mean. Us. So they have to rely on us.”
She found herself shivering. “Then if we’re not in the Core, we must be here.” She drew her finger along the threads of wormhole paths which left the main circle and crossed the gray spaces to the second, smaller disc. “…Outside the Star.” She looked at him. “Hork — what are we going to find when we open the door to this chamber?”
He stared into her eyes, his brashness gone, utterly unable to answer.
Farr was waiting for Adda at Toba Mixxax’s home. Ito Mixxax was there, but not Toba or Cris. The City-tilt had made a mess of the Mixxaxes’ domesticity: crockery and other material had been smashed against the walls, and fragments drifted in the Air.
Ito had her arm around Farr, trying to comfort or reassure him; when Adda opened the door to the home, Farr greeted his arrival with relief, a smile, while Ito looked merely disappointed that it wasn’t her husband or son. They were both uninjured, though Farr looked shocked. Adda came to them both and placed a hand on their shoulders. The three of them drifted there, at the center of the Mixxaxes’ cozy room, their human warmth sufficient for a brief moment.
Then they pulled apart. Ito Mixxax looked drawn, but composed. “What are you going to do? Do you want to stay here?”
He looked at Farr. The boy must be worried sick about his sister. But it would do no good to stay here and let him brood. Besides, despite its lingering domesticity, what sanctuary was this place, any more than the rest of Parz? “We’re going to the Hospital,” he said firmly. “Or at least, we’ll try to get there. We’ll find work to do there. What about you?”
“Toba was with me at the Games. In the Stadium.” She sighed, looking more weary than afraid. “We got separated. I’ll have to wait for him here. Then we’ll start searching for Cris, I suppose. We ought to be able to get the car out of the City.” She looked at Adda, appraising him, evidently trying to concentrate on his needs. “Do you want to rest here? Are you hungry?”
“No.” He reached for Farr; the boy took his hand, meekly, like a child. “Come on, Farr. It’s not food they’ll be short of in that damn Hospital, but strength, and courage, and ingenuity. And…”
There was an explosion from the heart of the City — no, not an explosion, Adda thought, but an immense tearing sound, a huge exhalation.
There was a moment of stillness. Then a shock passed through the City.
The very fabric of the structure seemed to flex. The little room rattled around them, and the fragments of crockery, already smashed, rattled in a thin hail against the walls.
When the tremor had passed, Farr asked, “What was that? Another settling in the Magfield?”
“I don’t think so. That was sharper — more abrupt… Come, lad. Let’s move.”
Ito kissed them both quickly on the cheek. “Be safe,” she said.
The Hospital of the Common Good was in the upper Downside, and Adda decided that the quickest way to get there — the most likely to be clear — would be through Pall Mall. So he and Farr Waved along one of the main artery-streets toward the broad axis of the City. It was a little easier to move now, Adda found; most people must have reached whatever destination they had been looking for — or, he reflected sadly, be lying hurt in some corner of the City. But the Air-cars were an increased menace. The cars soared along the emptying streets behind teams of terrified Air-pigs; several times the Human Beings had to lurch aside to stop themselves being run down. Once they came across a car which had embedded itself nose-first into a shop-front. There was no sign of the driver, but the Air-pig team was still attached to its harness. The pigs strained against their restraints, their circular mouths wide as they screamed.
Farr loosened the harness. Released, the pigs fled away into the shadows of the corridors, caroming from the walls like toys.
They reached the junction of the artery-street and the Mall. Adda rested at the street’s rectangular lip for a moment, then prepared to launch himself out into the main shaft. But Farr grabbed his arm and held him back. The boy pointed downward. Adda stared into his face, then squinted down, blinking to clear his good eyecup.
The lower end of the Mall — the huge spherical Market — was filled with light. Too much light, which glinted from the guide rails, stall sites, the huge execution Wheel… Yellow Air-light, which flooded into the heart of the City from a new, ragged shaft that cut right through the Mall itself, just above the Market.
So here was the cause of the shock they had experienced with Ito.
The edges of the shaft were neat — so neat that Adda might almost have thought it was man-made, another avenue. But the cross-section of this shaft was irregular — formless, nothing like the precise rectangles and circles which defined Parz — and it was off-center, askew, too wide.
Adda drifted out into the Mall a little way and stared down at the gash.
The inner skin of the Mall had been sloughed away, shops and homes scoured off as cleanly as if by a blade. And within the gash itself he could see the cross-sections of cut-open homes, shops. There were splashes of broken flesh. He heard human voices, but no screams: there were groans, and low, continuous weeping.
Farr joined him in the Air. “What is it? What’s happened?”
“A Sea-fragment,” Adda said grimly. “The City has been hit. Looks as if the berg passed straight through… We’re lucky the City wasn’t smashed wide open… Come on, Farr. Let’s see if that damn Hospital is still working.”
They dropped down the wide, almost empty shaft of the Mall, searching for a way to get to the Hospital.
24
Hork ran his thick fingers around the seam of the door. Then, impatient, Waving to give himself leverage, he laid his hands flat against the door and shoved.
The door swung back on invisible hinges, heavy and silent; Air hissed.
Through the doorway Dura caught glimpses of another, larger chamber, walled by more of the featureless gray material.
For a moment Hork and Dura hesitated before the doorway.
“Let’s get on with it,” Hork growled. He grasped the edges of the doorframe. With a single fluid movement he hauled his bulk through; his small feet, Waving gently, disappeared into the frame.
With a sigh, Dura took hold of the frame. Like the rest of the wall material the frame edges were cool to the touch, but the walls seemed knife-thin and the edges dug into her palms. She laid her hands carefully on the outer surface of the wall, beyond the frame, and pushed herself through.
The outer chamber was another tetrahedron — and constructed of the ubiquitous gray-bland material — but perhaps ten times as large, a hundred mansheights across or more. This room would be as large as any enclosed space in Parz City. The chamber from which she had emerged floated at the heart of this new room, its vertices and edges aligned with the chamber within which it was embedded. Dura wondered vaguely what was holding the smaller chamber in place; there were no signs of struts, supports or ropes.
Perhaps they were in a nest of these tetrahedral chambers, one contained in the other, she speculated; perhaps if they went beyond these walls they would swim into a third chamber, ten times larger again, and then onward…