He flipped his legs and pulled a little further away from the City. The Skin was like a gigantic mask, looming over him. This close he could see its detail — how it was crudely cobbled together from mismatched sections of wood and Corestuff — but it was hugely impressive nevertheless. The dozens of cargo ports in this part of the Skin were, he thought, like mouths, continually ingesting; or perhaps like capillary pores, taking in a granular Air of wood and food. As he pulled back still further he saw the huge, unending falls from the sewage outlets spread across the base of the City; the roar of the semisolid stuff tumbling into the underMantle seemed to fill the Air.
The City — battered and imperfect as it might be — was magnificent, he realized slowly; it was like an immense animal, noisily alive, utterly oblivious of his own tiny presence before its face.
He heard his name called.
He glanced around, but Cris had gone. Farr felt an absurd stab of disorientation — after all, he had a far smaller chance of getting lost out here than in the City’s guts — and twisted, staring around. There was Cris, his orange coverall bright, a distant, Waving figure suspended on his Surfboard. He was close to the Skin but far above Farr’s head. He’d slipped away while Farr was daydreaming.
Embarrassed, a little irritated, Farr thrust at the Air, letting the upfluxer strength in his legs hurl him toward Cris.
Cris watched him approach, grinning infuriatingly. “Keep up. There are people waiting for us.” He clambered back onto his board, turned and led the way.
Farr followed, perhaps a mansheight behind; one after the other the boys soared over the face of the City.
Cris’s Surfing technique was spectacular, bearing little relation to the cut-down caricature he had shown Farr inside the City. Cris pivoted the gleaming board under one bare foot while thrusting with the other heel at the back of the board, making it Wave vigorously. His bare soles seemed able to grip at the surface’s fine ridges. He kept his arms stretched out in the Air for balance, and the muscles in the City boy’s legs worked smoothly. The whole process looked wonderfully easy, in fact, and Farr felt a dull itch — in the small of his back and in his calves — as he stared at Cris. He longed to try out the Surfboard for himself. Why, with his enhanced strength, here at the Pole, he could make the damn thing fly…
But he couldn’t deny Cris’s skill as he expertly levered his mass and inertia against the soft resistance of the Magfield. The speed and grace of Cris’s motion, with electron gas crackling around the Corestuff strips embedded in the board, was nonchalant and spectacular.
They were climbing up and around the City’s Skin, generally away from the sewage founts at the base but on a diagonal line across the face. They crossed one of the huge Longitude anchor-bands. Farr saw how the band was fixed to the Skin by pegs of Corestuff at intervals along its length. The gleaming Corestuff strip was wider than a mansheight, and — in response to the huge currents surging through the band’s superconducting core — electron gas played unceasingly over its smooth surface. The Magfield here was distorted, constricted by the band’s field; it felt uneven, harsh, tight around Farr’s chest.
Cris clambered off his board and joined Farr in Waving away from the Skin, working cautiously past the anchor-band. “Magfield’s too spiky here,” Cris said curtly. “You can’t get a proper grip.”
Past the anchor-band, the Skin unfolded before Farr’s gaze. He’d expected the Skinscape to be featureless, uniform, except for the random blemishes of its construction. But it was much too huge to allow such uniformity, he soon realized. As they climbed toward the City’s equator, toward the Upside areas, the huge cargo ports and public Air-shafts became more sparse, to be replaced by smaller, tidier doorways evidently meant for humans and Air-cars, and by small portals which must be windows or light-shafts for private dwellings. A man leaned out of a window and hurled out a bowl of what looked like sewage; the stuff sparkled as it dispersed. Cris cupped his hands around his mouth and called down a greeting. The man — squat and yellow-haired — peered out into the sky, startled. When he spotted the boys he shook his fist at them, shouting something angry but indistinguishable. Cris yelled abuse back, and Farr joined in, shaking his fist in return. He laughed, exhilarated by this display of disrespect; he felt free, young, healthy, released from the confines of the City, and the comparison with the sour old man in his windowed cell made his condition all the sweeter.
They flew past an area of hull covered by a crude framework, a rectangular lattice of wood. Behind the framework the Skin was broken open, exposing small chambers within the City lit by dim green wood-lamps. Huge sections of wooden paneling drifted in the Air outside the City, attached loosely to the framework by lengths of rope; men and women clambered over the framework, hauling at the panels and hammering them into place in the gaps in the Skin.
“Repairs,” said Cris in uninterested response to Farr’s question. “They go on all the time. My father says the City’s never really been finished; there’s always some section of it that needs rebuilding.”
They arced high across a comparatively blank area of hull, unblemished by door, window or port. Farr looked back to see the last small portals recede over the City’s tightly curving horizon, and soon there was no break in the Skin in sight. Cris Surfed on in silence, subdued. Moving over this featureless Skinscape Farr felt absurdly as if he had been rejected by the City, thrown out and shunned — as if it had turned its back.
Now they passed another group of humans clambering over the Skin. At first Farr thought this must be another set of repair workers, but the Skin here was unbroken, clearly undamaged. And there was no repair scaffolding — just a loose net spread across the Skin. A group of perhaps twenty adults were huddled in one corner of their net, engaged in some unidentifiable project. Peering down as they passed, Farr saw how belongings had been stuffed loosely into the net; he saw spears, crude clothing and smaller folded-up nets that wouldn’t have seemed out of place among the belongings of the Human Beings. There was even a small colony of Air-pigs which jostled slowly against the wooden wall, bound by ropes to a peg which had been hammered into the Skin. An infant child squirmed inside the net, crying; its wails, sweet and distant, carried through the silent Air to Farr.
A woman, fat and naked, turned from whatever she was engaged in with her companions, and peered up at the boys. Farr saw how her fists were clenched. He looked to Cris for a lead, but the City boy simply Waved on with his board, keeping his eyes averted from the little colony below.
Farr, burning with curiosity, glanced down again. To his relief he saw that the woman had turned away and was returning to her companions, evidently forgetting the boys.
“Skin-riders,” Cris said dismissively. “Scavengers. There are whole colonies of them, living off remote bits of the Skin like this.”
“But how do they survive?”
“They take stuff from the sewage founts, mostly. Filter it out with those nets of theirs. Some of it they consume themselves, and some they use to feed their pigs. Many of them hunt.”
“Doesn’t anybody mind?”
Cris shrugged. “Why should they? The Skin-riders are out of the way in places like this, and they don’t absorb any of the City’s resources. You could say they make Parz more efficient by extracting what they can out of everyone else’s waste. The Committee only takes action against them when they go rogue. Turn bandit. Some tribes do, you know. They ring the exit portals, waiting to descend on slower-moving cars. They kill the drivers and steal the pigs; they’ve no use for the cars themselves. And sometimes they turn on each other, fighting stupid little Skin-wars no one else understands. Then the guards step in. But apart from that, I guess the City is big enough to support a few leeches on its face.” He grinned. “Anyway, there’ll always be Skin-riders; you could never wipe them out. Not everyone can live their lives inside six wooden walls.” He bent his knees, flourishing the board. “Which is one reason I’m out here today. I’d have thought you’d understand that, Farr. Maybe the Skin-riders are a little like your people.”