below.
“The Morthanveld have this thing about clarity,” Hippinse told them. “The Culture wouldn’t
Inside, the Facility was a little ribbon-world of its own, a rotating loop of landscape dotted with parkland, rivers, lakes and small hills, the air above filled with delicate-looking flying machines. Ferbin and Holse both felt the gravity building up as they descended.
Halfway down, approaching a conglomeration of what looked like huge half-silvered glass beads stuck on to the spoke like some aquatic accretion, the car began to slow. It fell out of the hazy sunshine into darkness and drew smoothly to a stop deep inside the cluster of silvery globes.
“Gentlemen!” Hippinse announced, clapping his chubby hands together. “Our destination!”
They entered the gently lit, pleasantly perfumed interior opening before them and walked along a curved, broadening corridor — the gravity was a little more than they were used to, but entirely tolerable — to an open space dominated by enormous rocks, small streams and broad pools, all overseen by a host of giant yellow-green and blue-brown plants joined together by nets of foliage. Silvery birds flitted silently across the scene. Overhead, the twisted lattice of the Nestworld revolved with a silent, steady, monumental grace.
Humans of a variety of body-types and skin colours were scattered amongst the plants, streams and pools. One or two glanced casually over in their direction, then away again. A few were entirely naked; a lot were mostly so. They appeared, to a man and woman, to be in excellent physical condition — even the more alien-looking ones somehow gave off an impression of glossy health — and so relaxed in their demeanour that the sight of their nudity wasn’t quite as shocking to the two Sarl men as they might have expected. Still, Ferbin and Holse glanced at each other. Holse shrugged. A man and a woman, each wearing only jewellery, walked past them, smiling.
Ferbin glanced at Holse again and cleared his throat. “Would appear to be permitted,” he said.
“So long as it’s not compulsory, sir,” Holse replied.
A small machine shaped like a sort of squared-off lozenge floated up to them. It said, again in perfect Sarl, “Prince Ferbin, Choubris Holse, LP Hippinse; welcome.”
They said their various hellos.
A woman — compactly elegant, dark-haired, clad in a long, plain blue shift that left only her arms and head exposed — was walking towards them. Ferbin felt himself frown. Was it really her? Older, so different…
She walked right up to him. The others around him were silent, even Hippinse, as though they knew something he didn’t. The woman nodded once and smiled, in a guarded but not unfriendly way.
He realised it really was Djan Seriy an instant before she opened her mouth to speak.
22. The Falls
“This is currently our most impressive sight,” Jerfin Poatas said, waving his stick at the bizarre building looming out of the dim bronze mists. The fellow had to raise his voice to be heard above the thunderous cacophony of the Falls, though he did so with a kind of ease that implied he didn’t even know he did it himself, Oramen thought.
The Fountain Building was indeed impressive. They were approaching it in a little covered carriage rattling along one of the many light railways which threaded their precarious and often dangerous ways across the islets, sandbars, parts of fallen buildings and anchored pylons set into the foaming waters themselves. The roof and side of the rail car were made from salvage gleaned from the unnamed city; a substance like glass, but lighter, flexible, far more clear than any glass Oramen had ever seen outside of a telescope or microscope, and without flaws. He drew one fingertip down the interior surface of the material. It did not even feel cold like glass. He put his glove back on.
The weather was chilly. In the sky, far to facing, almost directly down the gorge of the Sulpitine after the river had tumbled away from the Falls, the Rollstars Clissens and Natherley had dropped to the horizon — Clissens seeming to graze it, Natherley already half-hidden by it — and only the fading Rollstar Kiesestraal was left to shed any new light on the Hyeng-zhar, rising from the direction Clissens and Natherley were setting.
Kiesestraal shed a weak, watery-looking blue-white light, but provided almost no warmth. Rollstars had a life of less than half a billion years and Kiesestraal’s was almost over: nearly burned out, it probably had only a few thousand years until extinguishment altogether, whereupon it would drop, falling from the ceiling fourteen hundred kilometres above to come crashing down through the atmosphere — producing one last, brief, awful burst of light and heat — to smack on to the surface of the Ninth somewhere along its course, and, if the star sages and catastrophists, astrologers and scientists had been mistaken in their calculations, or if their warnings went unheeded, cause utter catastrophe where it fell, potentially killing millions.
Even with nobody present directly underneath, the fall of a dead star, especially on to a level featuring a majority of solid ground, was an apocalyptic event, pulverising earth and rock to dust and fire, sending projectiles the size of mountains soaring like shrapnel all about it to produce still further terrible impacts which would themselves birth smaller and smaller successions of crater, ejecta and debris until finally all that was left was wasteland — its centre scoured to Bare, to the very bone of the world — and clouds of dust and gas and years of spreading, dissipating winters, terrible rains, failed crops and screeching, dust-filled winds. The world itself rang to such impacts. Even directly beneath the ceiling of a floor being so struck, a human might struggle to notice any effect, the structure of a Shellworld was so strong, but machines throughout every level from Core to Surface registered the blow and heard the world ring like a vast bell for days afterwards. The WorldGod, it was said, heard the Starfall, and grieved.
Thankfully, such catastrophes were rare; the last one suffered by Sursamen had been decieons ago. They were also, apparently, part of the natural life of a modified Shellworld. So the Oct and Aultridia and other Shellworld Conducer species claimed. All such destruction led to forms of creation, they assured, producing new rocks, landscapes and minerals. And stars could be replaced, new ones emplaced and kindled, even though such technology was seemingly beyond species like the Oct and Aultridia, who relied on the good graces of the Optimae for these actions.
This fate awaited Kiesestraal and whatever part of the Ninth it fell upon; for now though, as if it was a great wave drawing the waters back before charging furiously back in, the star gave out a thin, attenuated seep of light, and over the whole course of the Sulpitine and well beyond, including the great inland seas at both ends of the river, a partial winter was making itself felt, first the air cooling and then the land and waters too as they radiated their heat away into the encroaching darkness. Soon the Sulpitine would start to freeze over and even the vast unending chaos of the Falls would be stilled. It seemed impossible, unbelievable, Oramen thought, looking about at the sudden, sporadic visions of madly dancing waters and waves which the eccentricities of Falls-created wind and pummelling walls of spray afforded, and yet it had happened in centuries past and would surely happen again.
The rail car was slowing. It was racketing along a raised section of narrow, uneven-looking track held above a shallow sandbar by tall pylons. The sandbar was surrounded by sweeps and curves of dashing, booming waters which looked like they could change course at any moment and wash the sands and pylons away. A gale seemed to shake the little rail car, briefly pulling away some of the surrounding mist and spray.
The Fountain Building soared above them now, bursting with curved fountains of water that turned to spray and rain and came dropping all around in an unceasing torrent that was starting to drum and beat upon the roof of the rail car, shaking it bodily. A chill wind moaned through spaces in the rail car’s body and Oramen felt the cold draught on his face. He wondered if the barrages and veils of water hitting the car would turn to snow as the winter came on but before the whole Falls froze. He tried to imagine this. How magnificent it would look!
These partial winters were almost unknown on the Eighth. On that level, the ceiling above was nearly completely smooth, so that a star, whether a Fixstar or a Rollstar, shed its light freely, casting its rays in every direction save where the horizon itself intervened. Here on the Ninth, for reasons known only to the Veil themselves and implied by the equations of whatever fluid physical figurings they employed, the ceiling — and, in places, the floor too — was much interrupted by the great vanes, blades and channels required to make the Shellworlds work according to their mysterious original purpose.
These features generally extended kilometres or tens of kilometres from the floor or ceiling and frequently
