As if from a great distance, she said,
Even from you. You are becoming a man, more than a son.
He coughed to cover the dark seethe within him. His erection would not go away and he was breathing deeply, mind buzzing.
“Clouds’re pretty thick,” Cermo sent back. “Can’t see much. In the far infra the view’s all jiggledy.”
“Now there’s a fine tech word,” Jocelyn joshed him.
“Jiggledy how?” Killeen asked.
“Looks like they reflect the city itself. I mean, stronger I look, more I get wavy pictures of streets, buildings.”
Shibo receded. Toby had focused his attention on the conversation around him and she had faded into the background. He concentrated, to push her further back. Made himself breathe slower. He couldn’t see anything through the clouds.
Cermo sent, “Microwave says it’s solid up there.”
“Solid?” Killeen nodded to himself. “Fits, yeasay.”
<I agree. We are in a rotating tube, so broad that water condenses along its axis, forming cloud banks. If we could see clearly across, we would see more of this city hanging above us. How the rotation is achieved in this puzzling place I do not know.>
“Glad to see you getting humble, ol’ cockroach,” Toby said. He wanted to cheer up the lumbering shape, but Cermo’s discovery made his voice shake a little. A city dangling over him, with nothing at all to hold it, kept up by some invisible law of physics—the thought made him hunch down a little, until he noticed and stood up straight again.
Three arms of ruby shell reached down suddenly and plucked Toby up above the street cobblestones. They swung him playfully to and fro, then dumped him onto the flat yellow carapace behind Quath’s head. “Hey!”
<Perhaps you will learn more from a higher perspective.>
“Whoosh! Not that there’s so much to see. I was already taller than the street signs. Funny names, aren’t they?”
The Bishop party was crossing Peach Boulevard on Pomegranate Camino Real, names Toby had to call up his Isaac Aspect to understand were mouth-watering ancient fruits—but there wasn’t a plant in sight.
<I find their reluctance to divulge data about this place suspicious.>
“If I take the measure of them right,” Killeen said, “they don’t give anything away free.”
Toby said, “Yeasay—downright nasty.”
<The Illuminates spoke of your tribal habits, the great variation in custom. They disagree over whether this is a source of your strengths, or a subtle weakness.>
“Ummm, maybe both. See, we’re used to people helping each other automatically, no questions asked. These folk don’t think like that—which implies a lot.”
<Such nuances of primate behavior are beyond my kind.>
“Simple, really,” Killeen said. “They aren’t under threat all the time. Comfortable people can afford to be choosy.”
Toby thought about that. “Could mean they’re pretty used to strangers, too.”
<I see your implication.>
“Oh? And what’s that?” Toby didn’t have any deeper idea, but he wasn’t going to acknowledge that here, the only kid among adults. You kept your luck to yourself.
<There are many more people within this structure than we see. Enough to make most be strangers.>
“Ummmm.” Killeen watched their guards edgily. “Could be.”
Toby felt edgy, as though some game was going on just beyond his seeing. Killeen was composed, controlled, giving nothing away. As he fretted over this he glanced down an alleyway and saw a building in the distance abruptly seem to melt, windows and arches dissolving, turning a mottled green. “Look!” It reformed itself with a freshly slanted roof, a new line of windows.
Killeen’s eyes narrowed. “That fits, too,” he said distantly.
“Fits what?” Toby watched new doorways pop open, ovals instead of the earlier strait-edged type.
“This city’s a kind of tech we’ve never seen. And I’ll bet it runs itself.”
Cermo sent a puzzled murmur. “Itself? Andro—”
“He’s a clerk.” Killeen gave Andro a bland smile, amused that they could talk this way right next to him. “These people, they’re no higher level than we are, come right down to it.”
“They sure don’t seem like they could build a Chandelier,” Cermo said.
“They didn’t,” Toby said firmly. “Don’t expect them to ever admit it, though.”
He walked past a splashing fountain, ideas tumbling fruitlessly, and felt a tilting, a rising presence—
—She moved lithely, inspired, skipping from stone to stone across the broken road, puddles from the night fogs showing her self and counter-self in the shredding gray light. Playing in the fresh dawn’s ruins. Jagged teeth from a night raid. Stumps of stone. A spider slept within the city, she saw it silver-fine and waiting. Stirring its barbed legs, the razor rub unheard beneath the waking bustle of her loved Citadel, fine and forlorn and always waiting for the next blow. Yet joy seeped from every moment. Shapes swarmed through this morning, the eternal going of people about their busyness, to strive against and fail and strive again. Even though they knew that the spider waited too, rustling in the eyesocket of a bleached skull—
He snapped out of it, panting. Forced his attention back to the street where his boots trod, his eyes caught the liquid dance of water.
Yet Shibo’s world was entrancing, too. It called forth a lightness of being, an airy sense of things merging, yet solidly grounded in a web of interplay, of casual and unspoken delight. These glimpses into her Personality contrasted hugely with the masculine edginess all around him, the holding-back, the control and analysis. Killeen’s blocky, muscular stride ahead of him spoke silently of purpose, precision, separation. Toby respected that, knew Family Bishop had to be led that way.
