Bzya grasped the pole. “Feel that? That was the Harbor. They’re pulling us up. We’re not dead yet. They’re trying to…”
And then the blue light came again, and this time stayed bright. Bzya felt the writhing Magfield haul at his stomach and the fibers of his body, even as it tore at the Bell itself.
Electron gas sparked from his own fingertips in streamers. It was really quite beautiful, he thought absently.
The Bell was hurled sideways, away from the Spine. Bzya’s hands were torn from the support pole. The Bell’s curving wall came up, like a huge cupped palm, to meet him. His face rammed into a window, hard. His body bent backward as it crammed itself into the tight inner curve of the wall. The structure of the Bell shuddered and groaned, and there was a distant, singing sound above him. That was the cables breaking, he thought through his pain. He felt oddly pleased at his own cleverness at such a deduction.
The walls wrenched, settled; the Bell rolled.
He fell into darkness.
Beyond the transparent walls, huge, ghostly buildings hovered over the humans.
The third chamber was immense, sufficient to enclose a million Parz Cities. The walls — made of the usual gray material, it seemed — were so far away as to be distant, geometric abstractions. Maybe this strange place was a series of nested tetrahedra, going on to infinity…
She Waved to Hork and reached out for him, blindly; still in the chair, he took her hands, and although his grip was strong she could feel the slick of fear on his palms. For a heartbeat she felt an echo of the passion they’d briefly found, in flight from terror during the journey.
The transparent structures hovered around them like congealed Air. They were translucent boxes hundreds of thousands of mansheights tall. And within some of the buildings more devices could be seen, embedded; the inner structures were ghosts within ghosts, gray on gray.
The tetrahedral box containing the “Pig,” the solid little chair, Hork and Dura themselves, were like specks of wood adrift in some mottled fluid. In fact, she realized, the whole of the tetrahedron they occupied was embedded inside one of the huge buildings; its gray lines sectioned off the space around them, and she looked out through its spectral flesh.
“Why do you suppose we can’t see these things clearly? And I wonder what their purpose is. Do you think…”
Hork was peering up at the “building” they were embedded in. He stared into its corners and at its misty protuberances, and then glanced down quickly at the chair he sat in.
“What’s wrong?”
“The ghost-building we’re inside. Look at it… It has the same shape as this chair.” The gray light of the translucent forms pooled in his eyecups. “It’s a hundred thousand times the size, and it’s made of something as transparent as clearwood and thinner than Air… but nevertheless, it’s an immense — spectral — chair.
She lifted her head. Slowly she realized that Hork was right. This immense “building” — at least a meter tall — had a seat, a back; and there, so far above her it was difficult to see, were two arms, each with its control lever.
Hork grinned, his face animated. “And I think I know what it’s all for. Watch this!”
He twisted his body. His chair swiveled in the Air.
She gasped, Waving away in alarm; but the chair came to rest, and no damage seemed to have been done. “What are you doing?”
“Don’t you understand yet? Look up!”
She tilted her head back.
The other “chair” — the ghostly analogue — had turned too, swiveling to match Hork’s lurch.
“See?” he crowed. “The chair is keyed to mine, somehow; whatever I make mine do, the big one must follow.” Hork swung this way and that, laughing like a child with a toy. Dura watched the giant analogue dance clumsily, aping Hork’s movements like some huge pet. Presumably, she thought, when the device swiveled, its substance must be moving around her — through her, in fact, like an unreasonable breeze. But she felt nothing — at least, no more than an inner chill which could as easily be caused by her awe and fear.
At last Hork tired of his games. “I can make it do whatever I want.” He looked a little more thoughtful. “And so if I pull these levers…”
“No. We need to work this out, Hork.” She looked up. “This — ghost, this City-sized artifact — is a seat big enough for a giant…”
“That’s obvious. But…”
“But,” she interrupted, “a giant of a certain form… a human-shaped giant, meters tall.” She studied his face, waiting for him to reach the same conclusions.
“Meters… The Ur-humans.”
She nodded. “Hork, I think the ghost-seat is an Ur-human device. I think we’re in a little bubble of Air, floating inside an Ur-human room.”
She tilted her head back on her neck, feeling the flesh at the top of her spine bunch under her skull, and looked up into a ghost-room which abruptly made sense.
They were inside a huge Ur-human chair. But there were other chairs — four of them, she counted, receding into mistiness, like a row of cities. The chairs were placed before a long, flat surface, and she caught hints of a complex structure beneath and behind that surface. Perhaps that was some form of control panel. Looking further out, the tetrahedral structure surrounding all of this was a sketch drawn against fog.
Hork touched her arm. “Look over there.” He pointed. On the side of the Ur-human room opposite the row of seats there was a bank of billowing gas — but that must be wrong, of course; she tried to forget her smallness, to see this through Ur-human eyes. It was a structure made up of something soft, pliable, piled up on a lower flat surface. It looked like a cocoon, laid flat.
Did the Ur-humans sleep?
Again Hork was pointing. “On top of that surface before the chairs. See? Instruments, built for giant hands.”
Dura saw a cylinder longer than a Crust-tree trunk. Its end was sharp, protruding over the lip of the surface. Perhaps it was a stylus, as she’d seen Deni Maxx use in the Hospital. She tried to imagine the hand that could grasp a tree trunk and use it to write notes… Beside the “stylus” there was another cylinder, but this was set upright. It seemed to be hollow — the cylinder was transparent to Dura’s eyes, and she could make out a structure of thick walls surrounding an empty space — and there was no upper surface.
She frowned and pointed out the second cylinder to Hork. “What do you think that is? It looks like a fortress. Perhaps the Ur-humans needed to shelter — perhaps they came under attack…”
He was laughing at her, not unkindly. “No, Dura. You’ve lost the scale. Look at it again. It’s maybe — what? — ten thousand mansheights tall?”
“Ten times as big as your glorious Parz City.”
“Maybe, but that’s still only ten centimeters or so. Dura, the Ur-humans were meters tall. The hand of an Ur-human could have engulfed that cylinder.” He was watching her slyly. “Do you see it yet? Dura, that’s a food vessel. A cup.”
She stared. A cup, large enough to hold a dozen Parz Cities?
She tried to keep thinking. “Well,” she said, “then it’s a damn odd cup. All the food would float out of the top. Wouldn’t it?”
Hork nodded grudgingly. “You’d think so.” He sighed. “But then, there are many things about the Ur-humans we can’t understand.”
She imagined this little box of Mantle-stuff from the outside. “It’s as if they created this inner chamber, around the wormhole Interface, as an ornament. A little section of the Star, so they could study Human Beings. We would look like toys to them,” she murmured. “Less than toys; little animals, perhaps below the level of visibility.” She looked at her hand. “They were a hundred thousand times taller than us; even the ‘Pig’ would have been no more than a mote in the palm of an Ur-human child…” She shivered. “Do you think any of them are still here?” She imagined a giant Ur-form floating in through some half-seen door, a face wider than a day’s journey billowing down toward her…