'This will be an entitled trans,' she spoke into the microphone grid decal in the bubble wall, and settled into the plush cushioning, the air cold on her neck. 'Go—direct to ground.'
'More information is needed,' said the floater in a perfectly modulated voice, neither male nor female.
'Address or building name is necessary.' The floater lurched slightly as it pulled away from its mooring.
'Please repeat or clarify.'
It was not easy to escape the address grid with a com floater, though some had not been reprogrammed since a free-form flight and thus could be sent anywhere. In any case, you couldn't survive without
From this perspective the landscape was much changed. But Aksinia was used to this aspect of the world, the places where no one went. To the horizon there stretched almost featureless boxes of concrete and senplast: a desert save where a tiny plot of ground sent forth the green and brown weeds/grasses. Aksinia hitched up the shopping-bag handles on her shoulder and silently began to walk. Thumbing rides was very different than it had been during its early days. It was simply a matter of being visible on the ground, being where a person never was. Someone would look down from the seat of a lifter and catch sight of you. It took anywhere from an hour to days. Occasionally you ran into another thumb-rider, but only very rarely. When that happened, you talked; said things you could never say to someone from above.
She started to walk, the nausea that she had felt a thing of the past. She popped a lozenge beneath her tongue and enjoyed the sensation of her strong legs moving her across desolation. Later, when she was skirting the edge of a cultivated field, passing row after row of diminutive, rigid plants separated by magnetic strips, her eyes were drawn from the nearest farm-float to a metallic glint far up in the patchy, cloud-striped sky. Not a lifter, no. Suddenly a contrail plumed out from it, tiny and at an oblique angle to the prevailing cloud-march. It was a shuttle, coming back. Returning from the endless blackness out there. Aksinia shuddered slightly and thought, That's where I'd like to go. The thought resonated within her.
Temujin Krzakwa held open a jagged fissure in the ground, into which Ariane Methol deeply probed. It was the best they could do. Thrusting in among the gossamer clockwork of the world, she put her delicate fingers into the elastomeric machinery and grappled with its underpinnings. It was all madness, of course, nothing so real as it seemed, but they were locked into a path of imagery now and had to live with it. The battle with Centrum's defenders, the eating of the imaginary thers, had done damage to the inner workings of Bright Illimit—not much, but enough. A single command had mutated, becoming inexecutable, and a whole section of action routines had gone out of reach. She deftly parted the substance, touching here and there, going where Tem's logic told her to search. It took time. Item after item seemed OK until she uncovered a waveguide-like tube with a dark, carboned knot blocking it. 'I think I found it,' she said. She read a tiny silver inscription on the wire. 'Terminus Junction 26:aleph-aleph subA033?'
Tem sent her a nod. 'That's probably it. We'd know better if we had a system architecture diagram, but, uh, what's it read now?'
She passed across it, like blind fingertips feeling out the subtle meanings of electronic braille. 'I can't quite . . . ah! 0Q30:0Q31,XFB1,028F:028E.'
Krzakwa almost snarled to himself and then felt amused. One fucking bit-pair swapped around on a near-three- hundred-trillion-byte address complex! No wonder we lost it! Load Link; Command Listen; and Decode Logic. He wanted to chuckle and finally did. 'That's it, all right. 028F:028E is nonsense. Supposed to be 028F:029R, I think.'
'You're not sure?'
He sent her a shrug. 'How can I be sure? That's the way a
HORMAD sequencing device usually writes it, but who knows what Brendan really did? There're a lot of oddities in this program.'
Including us, Ariane thought. 'I'll have to take your word for it,' she said. 'I was never this far into the substrata of execution control before.' Really. Who ever heard of servicing high-level software from underneath? She sighed. 'Ax, let me have your diadem, please.' When she had it, she activated the gem, pushing the numbers around, a shift left to add twice, and it was done. The Dramatic Creation subroutines reconnected themselves with a metaphysical thump.
Harmon lifted her out and Tem let the earth snap shut. She turned over onto her back and gasped. All of them turned and looked where she pointed. Centrum's castle towered above them, a looming slate-gray mass, obscured by deep shadow, perspective giving it a bizarre aspect ratio that made it almost triangular in shape. A heavy battlement wall of irregular stone, topped with massive tooth-shaped merlons, protected the inner castle, which was positively medieval. Above the citadel massed towers, themselves crenellated, loomed. To give it a thoroughly alien feel, a ring of black machines, blunt and intricate, hung like broken boulders in a wide orbit about the towers. The castle, as before, did not sit on the ground but floated above a terribly truncated horizon that could not have been more than a mile distant. The sky had became twilit, clouds turning taupe and gray, drifting in striated bands across a sky hued into dark orange and vermilion, a band of sunset all around that merged into a circle of indigo and black directly overhead. The program let them assume the invisible sun had already set, but it could not quite provide them with stars. The ground humped up into mounds, carrying them upward in a single-surge earthquake, and silhouetted purple hills rose up to hide the unnatural horizon, making a believable edge to creation. A blanket of short green grass sprang up at their feet and roared outward to clothe the world's bones, shivering in waves before
