The people down there weren't part of the Renaissance. Some dozen or so of the climbers looked human, though with them were things that had the unmistakable air of morphonts: artificial life-forms that built bodies for themselves from strands of nanotech. These morphonts walked on legs, and they had heads. They also twined together, forming something like a mobile fence, and they stayed downslope from the humans, a sort of living guardrail.
The humans looked ragged and half-starved, and some of them were limping. The morphonts were clearly friendly, and morphonts meant the sophistication and resource-rich worlds of the arena; but the humans seemed neither sophisticated nor rich. He'd seen photos of people like them--telephoto images taken through kilometers of air. Keir's recent memories were fuzzy, but he did remember the pictures: of a people who lived in permanent weightlessness, building rotating cities for gravity and flying chemical-powered aircraft in a world where only the most primitive of technologies worked.
But it couldn't be.
He scowled and barked a laugh and walked to the edge of the balcony to get a look at those lights with his own eyes. They were still there.
He heard the gunshot cracks that signaled an avalanche--they went on and on, signaling a big fall this time. Squinting, he thought he could actually see something way up the wall above the city, like a vast pale hand reaching down. Keir turned all his dragonflies to that view, and now he could make it out: a veritable continent of ice peeling away from the slope ten kilometers or more overhead.
He called up his scry, the collection of processors, communications systems, and interfaces that helped him keep up with the multilayered, surreal world the adults of the Renaissance had built. He tried to call the nannies, then anybody else in Complication Hall; but it was too far away.
This far up the world's slope, gravity was less than half a standard g. He looked up at the majestically bowing facade of ice, then down at those wavering, faint lights below the city; and he asked his scry how long it would take before the one landed on the other.
The answer came back almost instantly; but then Keir stood there frowning for long seconds, as his breath frosted in front of him.
Then he cursed and ran inside, down two halls, and out to another stairway. His instinct was to hesitate, but he'd set a timer in his scry telling him exactly how long he had before the ice reached the slope below. So he tested the top steps and, when they held him, leaped down the rest recklessly, accompanied by a cloud of watchful eyes. Soon he was standing on the round parapet of a minaret, and in the upper right corner of his visual field, the timer was still ticking down. He went down this next staircase, but in the darkness it took much longer than he'd hoped. When he emerged from an outside doorway to stand on unworked rock, he was sure it was too late.
This slope lay in the shadow of Complication Hall's lights, but it wasn't completely dark. A faint red glow permeated the air from the far distance, and this gave just enough light for him to make out tumbled stones and a nearby goat path.
Here he made the mistake of looking up. With the help of the dragonflies he could plainly see a ceiling of white, kilometers wide, lowering toward the city.
He could see the strangers' lights--they were close at hand now--and, very close by, the entrance to a tunnel that doubtless ran into Brink's foundations. It was clear the people with the lanterns couldn't see that archway, because it lay above them and behind some tall boulders, and their little lights could only reach a few meters anyway.
'Heeeyy!' He jumped and waved his arms, but nobody noticed. The strangers were picking their way one step at a time, heads bent and focused on their task. Yet they must have heard the cataclysmic cracking of the ice sheet; must know that even now it was silently bearing down on them.
Now that he was close enough Keir tried to hail the newcomers through his scry. It didn't register them at all. And according to his timer the ice would be here in a matter of seconds.
He swore and began leaping down the rocks toward them.
Now the orange-lit ovals of their faces turned in his direction. They all stopped walking and he could see them talking--verbally--among themselves; there was a sudden flurry of movement and, just as he half-slid down the last few meters, four of them produced odd, compact handheld devices and pointed them at him. Keir's scry identified these as weapons--but the idea that
'Run!' He pointed in the direction of the entrance he'd spotted, which really was invisible from here. 'Ruuuuun! There!'
One of them stepped forward. She was pale-skinned, her features oddly mis-composed, as though she'd never taken the effort to adjust her bone structure or skin type. 'Who are you?'
'Never mind! Run!' And, because his timer had about fifteen seconds left to it, he bounded past them, making for that other entrance. 'Come on!'
'Why?' she shouted after him. 'Is it--'
'The ice!' Belatedly, they began to move. With eight seconds left, Keir made it to the archway. Two blind goats were cowering in the entrance, but beyond them, it ran back into indeterminate blackness.
Eleven seconds, and the first of the strangers reached the arch.
Thirteen, and the strange goat-railing creatures scrabbled up; one was carrying a man on its back.
Fifteen seconds and the rest of them were in. Nothing happened, and the last of the strangers--including the woman--were only meters away.
A new silhouette appeared in the doorway. It looked like a man, but when the woman saw it she screamed. One of the men raised something that looked like a primitive weapon and shouted, 'Keep back!'
'Let me in!' shouted the stranger. 'I just want to talk.'
Keir jumped at a loud bang and the silhouette staggered back. The woman ducked her face in her hands, the others were standing, shouting, and--
