“What do we do, supposing we are in Laputa-Blish?” asked a girl with a stiff, gangly body.
“Do what we came to do without the virus, of course, you stupid bitch,” Flan Burke said as she rotated, knees to chin, through Zillah’s view. She looked both fierce and comfortable. “Do you think we came for a holiday?”
“Flan’s right,” Roz proclaimed. “We mount an attack regardless.”
The walls, seats, and ceiling had been rotating spirally about them as they talked, spinning everyone into a kind of plait along the length of the Celestial Omnibus. Now the motion changed again. Zillah found herself falling, gently and inevitably, together with half the floating company, toward the rear of the capsule.
“What’s going on now?” someone squawked from the other end of the aisle. That aisle now stood up from Zillah like a tube, and people hung there at the other end with outspread arms, inexplicably.
“Rotation, that’s all. We must be flipping over and over. Gives us gravity at both ends.”
Whoever said that must be right, Zillah thought, as her feet landed on the silvery wall that concealed the life support. She could hear it hissing beyond the metal. She hoped it was meant to hiss. It sounded nastily like a gas leak. She had a vivid vision of the capsule turning over and over in space, perhaps endlessly. She had been mad to bring Marcus. He was stirring and mumbling against her shoulder, disturbed by the hissing and the changes of gravity — perhaps also by Zillah’s own rising panic. In a moment she was going to be screaming like Judy, and that would wake Marcus.
She soothed him and she rocked him, trying to throw her panic into the distance, out, away, into whatever appalling emptiness surrounded the capsule. Marcus calmed. He slept steadily again. Zillah tried to convince herself that she was calm, too, by turning to the young man who had landed curled up on the backrest of the seat sticking out of the wall beside her. He was nice-looking. She did not know him well, but she thought his name was Tam — Tam Fairbrother, or something like that.
“Excuse me,” she said. “I know it seems silly, but I only got here at the last minute. What is the attack Roz and Flan were talking about? Can you put me abreast of the plans?”
Tam did not answer. This puzzled Zillah at first. It took her a long, difficult minute to realize that Tam was dead. So was everyone else at this end of the capsule.
3
Tod was given an all-over gossamer-thin suit with smickering suction-soles. The soles were the only things that impeded him as he walked into the big, tranparent bubble of the rescue port. The rest of the suit was Arth’s secret, some kind of time-tested magework that allowed a man to breathe and move normally while protecting him from vacuum, germs, and even fire. Exploring it as he walked, Tod thought it was simply a hundredfold thickness of any mage’s usual protective circle — in which case, it must have taken years to make. However it was done, it was a wondrous efficient thing. The High Head may have intended this as a punishment, but Tod felt like a schoolboy on a treat. He stared out and around into the cerulean blueness beyond the port’s bubble and finally detected the silvery flash-flash of the rogue capsule turning over and over as it fell toward the citadel from about the ten o’clock position.
“This is something like!” he murmured. Up till then he had hardly believed there really was a capsule.
It was coming fast, too, enlarging rapidly as he watched it. Behind him, safe inside the walls, a monitoring mage murmured reports of what he was able to gather from the shocked minds inside the thing. Another, from Calculus, spoke crisp figures about speed, position, and deflections due to the storm the thing itself was arousing. Some other higher Brother was relaying orders to ranked mages from Ritual Horn, who were supposed to apply the brakes to the hurtling object. Tod could also hear various kinds of rescue teams gathering in the bubble at his back, but they kept away from him because, of course, he was in disgrace.
“Now!” said the higher Brother. Tod felt the force go out.
They had done it, too! The rotating silver shape swept to one side and whirled out of sight beyond the blue wall of the citadel. But they had cut it fine to Tod’s mind. The thing had surely all but impinged on the nearly unseeable veil that held Arth’s atmosphere. Still, why grumble? They had deflected it. Now presumably they had to slow it down enough to maneuver it into the funnel of veiling that led to the rescue port.
4
It was close and fuggy inside the Celestial Omnibus. That hissing, Zillah thought. We’re all going to die. A voice spoke, from somewhere in the central part where no one could go. “Be calm,” it said. “Please attend.”
It was a deep male voice that struck ringing echoes from the walls in a way none of their own voices did. Marcus stirred at the sound of it and came awake quite peacefully. Even Judy stopped whimpering.
“I speak for the Brotherhood of Arth,” the voice continued. “Have no fear. The Goddess has permitted you to enter Arth. Our skills will bring you safely to the citadel. Be calm and you will see.”
The accent struck Zillah as Scottish at first, but it also had a burr to it that suggested Cornwall. Whatever, the deep, measured speech was decidedly soothing. Thank you! Bless you! she thought.
And thinking that, she found she could see the citadel the voice spoke of, in a sort of round white viewport that floated just in front of — or maybe just behind — her eyes. Marcus had no doubt that the sight was in front of him. He stretched out a starfish hand and made his pigeon noise. The place — building? — lay below like a toy, an improbable blue castle sprouting hornlike turrets in all directions from a flat base. Turrets and central block had windows of all sizes, but there seemed to be no doors. Some of the turrets supported open gold devices like crowns, multiple ladders, and many-petaled flowers.
A babble of exclamations greeted it from down the front end of the Celestial Omnibus, and Judy’s voice demanding, “What is it? What are you all looking at?”
He means just what he says — the voice — Zillah thought. If you don’t panic, you can see. Poor Judy.
She watched the castle enlarge with incredible swiftness. We are going fast. Will they ever stop us?
The thought had hardly entered her mind before something caught the Celestial Omnibus and steered it sharply away sideways. Gravity altered too, not so sharply, but inexorably. Zillah found herself able to stagger forward up the aisle and guide herself and Marcus into a seat not quite halfway along. Behind her, bodies of people she did not want to look at subsided to drape over seat-backs or flop into the gangway. Up front, Flan and Roz were forcing Judy into a seat.
None of this interfered with the vision of the castle. They were sweeping over it, above it, and down the other side.
“They’ve put us in a braking orbit, I think,” the gawky girl said very coolly from up front.
Must be that, Zillah thought, watching their dive to the flat base of the building and around underneath it. But here something decidedly odd happened. Instead of finding the Celestial Omnibus speeding along above the flat base, which surely ought to have appeared as a large disc, there was the merest blink of darkness, after which they were soaring up past the great blue walls of the fortress on the other side. It was as if the castle had no bottom at all — or one only a few feet across. There were exclamations from everyone about this, and then further exclamations as they all realized they were now much nearer the fortress and traveling at less than half the speed. As they swept over and above the multiple turrets this time, they were near enough to see several gardens, some in deep wells between turrets, and others niched high in among complex hornworks. A great open space appeared, beside the central block, and a tiny group of people hastening across it, who looked up and pointed. Then they were going down again, past blue walls and a hundred windows of many shapes.