“With our property intact.”
Her friendly bluster vanished. The transformation was so sudden it seemed to Nigel that he saw a wholly new face. Heavy brows tinted auburn, split by a deep frown line. Sunken, brilliant yellow eyes below—visible when the artificial eyes went suddenly transparent. Her hands were ribbed and knobbed like enlarged gloves—which, Nigel realized belatedly, they were—which angled forth fat fingers of obvious strength. He wondered why she needed them.
“Snarfs, eh?” she said in a menacing whisper.
Her gloved hands unsheathed into thin, servo’d fingers that jutted from the sausage-thick ones. Sharp, businesslike. “Then you be coming with.”
Ito stepped forward, scowling This was just the kind of problem a young man would rise to, Nigel saw, and in the set of Ito’s jaw trouble was coming. Nigel was a half step behind him as Ito began, “I don’t think I like the way you—”
—and Ito was on the ground. Nigel had not even seen her move. She had punched him and returned to exactly the same position in an eye-blink.
NINE
The Tilted City
The city was on edge. Not meaning in a foul mood, Nigel thought to himself as they coasted over, through, and around the steepled constructions, but quite literally.
The spired sprawl canted up into the filmy air as though it had been formed in a bowl until it hardened, and then shucked free—so that the curved base tipped nearly all the way over, a crescent moon about to crash down.
But it was at least a hundred kilometers across. It rested on a rocky plain, a colossal ornament on the inside of a spherical bulge in Sawazaki Lane. In the far foggy distance he could see the annular geometry they had emerged from. Tricks of sliding perspective and the sharp dry air made everything here seem miniature.
They banked in and the illusion vanished. The city became a forest of slender spires, jewels jutting up from the curved base. They swelled into thick, serpentine buildings studded with tiny lights: windows.
In the city gravity pointed at “local down” as naturally as ever. Only by walking some distance through the curiously cushioned streets could one tell that the direction veered steadily, accommodating the bowl’s curvature. The effect struck Nigel as miraculous.
“How do they do this?” he wondered. “Gravity like hands cupping a baby’s butt?”
Nikka frowned but it was unlike her to admit being stumped. “They’ve figured a way to make the esty exert gravitational forces and torques at a distance . . . I think.”
The woman escorting them, whose name proved to be Tonogan, said sardonically, “We tilt our city for religious reasons. You would not understand.”
Nigel could not tell whether she was joking but it seemed an unlikely extravagance. He could see the air shimmer with compressed forces at the city’s rim. It occurred to him that if the effect was real, and not some bizarre optical illusion, then it demanded that gravitational waves be radiated from the visible plain below up to the esty that cupped the city. But gravitational waves of such intensity were incredible. Or so he thought.
He remembered the pictures of the two black holes merging, marrying, and giving birth to something wholly different between them. Maybe the way to think here was with biological metaphors, not the old physics ones he had learned at Cambridge so long ago.
They passed through crowds whose size, mass, attire (where there was any), and facial gestures ran a gamut Nigel had never seen before. Some were antic, reacting to everything. Others seemed sublimely indifferent to the rabble of the oddly shaped who ambled, meandered, drifted, strolled, and marched without apparently acknowledging each other or, indeed, the ordinary laws of physics. Some seemed lighter, making great bounds. Others skated on unseen platforms. (Nigel tried to trip one, but the fellow slid past without a glance and for half an hour later his foot, which had felt no contact, was bitingly cold.) Some flew with outspread arms. Others scarcely seemed to walk at all, but moved forward swiftly on unseen carriers.
A passing man lit a cigarette of some sweet-smelling stuff by scraping the knob end against his belt. Nigel wondered what happened if you dropped a whole pack of them knob-down.
Some wore sandpaper-rough clothing to keep people at a respectful distance; a useful urban attire Nigel had not seen before. Despite the noise and confusion, an old game played out: locals were doing their best to accommodate the visitors and relieve them of any excess cash.
A kid slapped a button on Angelina’s shoulder and it began to speak. “Dooed the upshift till you be down? Want to go/get level? Think pointo and—” Angelina pried off this portable advertisement and tossed it away, where it stuck to a wall and began its pitch again.
Tonogan swerved suddenly into a broad opening in a pyramidal building. The family, gawking, hastened to keep up. She never looked back, apparently certain that they would follow. Inside, the floor propelled them through intersecting streams of men and women with fluorescent neck and ear tattoos, who came and went with bewildering speed, legs scissoring. At a large, ornate, copper-sheen doorway stood two well-muscled men wearing wraparound gray that accentuated their chest and shoulders. They stood rigidly, Nigel noted, and looked quite intrepid.
They were apparently protecting an obese woman in a violently purple bag-dress. She wore skin to match, a near perfect shade. Yawning, she languidly glanced up as they came through the vertically pivoting door.
“Good waxing.” Her voice rippled with polished undertones, as though she truly felt that it was a good rising of the esty’s fitful light and hoped that you did, too.
She went back to looking at a scroll held in one hand. It unrolled on its own and she seemed fascinated with it, not even looking up as Tonogan rattled off a rapid-fire summary. They were standing in a gallery that gave onto an odd courtyard. As Tonogan spoke something like a six-legged dog trotted about courtyard center. It seemed to glide more than walk among the plants that festooned the area—big speckled yellow-green effusions, geysers of leafy abundance.
The large woman interrupted Tonogan with, “I see the scans. A family, um. Quite a large area to transslip, eh?”
She looked at Nikka, who answered. “We want help in getting back to our Lane, at our esty cords.”
Nigel felt a quiet pride; ever Nikka, ever direct. Nigel was a doddering language purist, and disliked shortening “coordinates” to “cords” since that obscured a perfectly good word for rope, but he also knew that to crunch the lingo was crucial. The trimmed English here—all verbs and plurals regular, simple constructions—was efficient, where travelers from other eras and territories crossed.
“Impossible.”
Nikka said patiently, “Technically it must be—”
“No no! It’s expensive.”
Nikka frowned, always uncomfortable with financial matters. Nigel said, “We could perhaps trade off a bit of our holdings.”
The purple woman looked distracted—back to her scroll. Nobody asked them to sit down and indeed there was no place to do so in this long, slick-floored vestibule. She occupied all of a spacious divan, with a bit more of her left over.
Finally she yawned, perhaps not for show. “You haven’t nearly enough. Interesting historical artifacts, but—”
“Historical?” Ito took affront.
“Well, you do come from”—a string of digits and words, meaningless to Nigel—“and that’s a wayfer.”
“Wafer?” Ito asked, his jaw working with irritation.
“Way far gone, as we say here. I speak your approximate regional language, be I not? I had to chipload for it, that be how much trouble I went to.” She waved a hand with sausage fingers in airy disdain and went back to her scroll. Apparently the rest of the world was supposed to freeze in place until her attention returned.
The strangely snakelike dog spotted a covey of dappled birds who had waddled out from beneath one of the leafy explosions. It went into a low stalk. The closer it got the slower and lower it went, until finally the birds burst into the sky and the dog dashed to where they had been. Trotting around, it wagged its eel-like tail.
