Flux

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.

“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.