She glanced across at Farr. He was already asleep, his head tucked down against his chest. She felt a burst of protective affection for her brother — and yet, she realized ruefully, he seemed less in need of protection than she did herself. Farr seemed to be absorbing the wonders and mysteries of this complex place with much more resilience and openness than Dura could find.
Dura sighed, clinging to the fragments of her dissipating feeling of protectiveness. Looking after her brother, at least nominally, made her able to forget her own sense of isolation and threat. Perhaps in an odd way, she thought drowsily, she needed Farr more than he needed her. In the quiet of the room, she became aware of noises from beyond the walls around her. There were murmured words from Toba, the uneven voice of the boy, Cris; and then it was as if her sphere of awareness expanded out beyond this single house, so that she could hear the soft insect-murmurings of thousands of humans all around her in this immense hive of people. The wooden walls creaked softly, expanding and contracting; she felt as if the whole City were breathing around her.
The cocoon soon grew hot, confining; impatiently she shoved her arms out into the marginally cooler Air. It took her a long time to find sleep.
The next day Ito seemed a little friendlier. After feeding them again she told them, “I’ve a day off work today…”
“Where do you work?” Dura asked.
“In a workshop just behind Pall Mall.” She smiled, looking tired at the thought of her job. “I build car interiors. And I’m glad of a bit of free time. Sometimes, at the end of my shift, I can’t seem to get the smell of wood out of my fingers…”
Dura listened to all this carefully. The conversation of these City folk was like an elaborate puzzle, and she wondered where to start the process of unraveling. “What’s a Pall Mall?”
Cris, the son, laughed at her. “It’s not a Pall Mall. It’s just — Pall Mall.”
Ito hushed him. “It’s a street, dear, the main one leading from the Palace to the Market… All this must be very strange to you. Why don’t you come see the sights with me?”
Uncertain, Dura looked to Toba. He nodded. “Go ahead. I’ve got to head back to the ceiling-farm, but you take your time; it’s going to be a few days before Adda’s ready for visitors. And maybe Cris can look after Farr for a while.”
Ito was eyeing Dura’s bare limbs doubtfully. “But I don’t think we should take you out like that. Nudity’s all right for shock value — but in Pall Mall?”
Ito lent Dura one of her own garments, a one-piece coverall of some soft, pliant material. The cloth felt smoothly comfortable against Dura’s skin, but as she sealed up the front of the outfit she felt enclosed, oddly claustrophobic. She tried Waving around the room experimentally; the material rustled against her skin, and the seams restricted her movements.
After a little thought she wrapped her battered piece of rope around her waist, and tucked her wooden knife and scraper inside the coverall. The homely feel of the objects made her feel a little more secure.
Cris stared at her with a skeptical grin. “You won’t need a knife. It isn’t the upflux here, you know.”
Again Ito hushed him; the two adults politely refrained from comment.
Leaving Farr with Cris, the two women left the home with Toba. He led them to his car, waiting in the “car park.” Dura helped him harness up a team of fresh pigs from the pen in the corner.
Toba took them through a fresh maze of unfamiliar streets. Soon they left behind the quiet residential section and arrived in the bustling central areas. Dura tried to follow their route, but once again found it impossible. She was used to orienting herself against the great features of the Mantle: the vortex lines, the Pole, the Quantum Sea. She suspected that keeping a sense of direction while tracking through this warren of wooden corridors was a skill which the children of Parz must acquire from birth, but which she would have to spend many months learning.
Toba brought them to the widest avenue yet. Its walls — at least a hundred mansheights apart — were lined with green-glowing lamps and elaborate windows and doorways. Toba pulled the car out of the traffic streams and hauled on his reins. “Here you are — Pall Mall,” he announced. He embraced Ito. “I’ll head off to the farm; I’ll be back in a couple of days. Enjoy yourselves…”
Ito led Dura out of the car. Dura watched, uncertain, as the car pulled away into the traffic.
The avenue was the largest enclosed space Dura had ever seen — surely the largest in the City itself. It was an immense, vertical tunnel, crammed with cars and people and full of noise and light. The two women were close to one wall; Dura could see how the wall was lined with windows, all elaborately decorated and lettered, beyond which were arrays of multicolored clothes, bags, scrapers, bottles and globes, elaborately carved lamps, finely crafted artifacts Dura could not even recognize. People — hundreds of them — swarmed across the wall like foraging animals; they chattered excitedly to each other as they plunged through doorways.
Ito smiled. “Shops,” she said. “Don’t worry about the crush. It’s always like this.”
All four walls of the avenue were lined with the “shops.” The wall opposite, a full hundred mansheights away, was a distant tapestry of color and endless human motion, rendered a little indistinct by the dusty Air; lamps sparkled in rows across its face and shafts of light shone from round ducts.
Pall Mall was alive with traffic. At first the swarming, braying cars seemed to move chaotically, but slowly Dura discerned patterns: there were several streams, she saw, moving up and down the avenue parallel to its walls, and every so often a car would veer — perilously, it seemed to her — from one stream to another, or would pull off Pall Mall into a side-street. The Air was thick with green jetfart, alive with the squealing of pigs. For a while Dura managed to follow Toba’s car as it worked its way along the avenue, but she soon lost it in the swirling lanes of traffic.
There was a strong, sweet smell, almost overpowering. It reminded Dura of the scented towels in Ito’s bathroom.
Ito, touching her arm, drew her toward the shops. “Come on, dear. People are starting to stare…”
Dura could hardly help goggle at the people thronging the shops. Men and women alike were dressed in extravagantly colored robes and coveralls shaped to reveal flashes of flesh; there were hats and jewels everywhere, and hair sculpted into huge, multicolored piles.
Ito led Dura through two or three shops. She showed her jewelry, ornaments, fine hats and clothes; Dura handled the goods, wondering at the fine craftsmanship, but quite unable to make sense of Ito’s patient explanations of the items’ use.
Ito’s persistence seemed to be wearing a little now, and they returned to the main avenue. “We’ll go to the Market,” Ito said. “You’ll enjoy that.”
They joined a stream of people heading — more or less — for that end of Pall Mall deepest inside the City. Almost at once Dura was thumped in the small of her back by something soft and round, like a weak fist; she whirled, scrabbling ineffectually at her clothes in search of her knife.
A man hurried past her. He was dressed in a flowing, sparkling robe. In his soft white hands he held leaders to two fat piglets, and he was being dragged in an undignified way — it seemed to Dura — after the piglets, his feet dangling through their clouds of jetfart. It had been one of the piglets that had hit Dura’s back.
The man barely glanced at her as he passed.
Ito was grinning at her.
“What’s wrong with him? Can’t he Wave like everyone else?”