The Harbor was an irregular compound of large chambers constructed of stained wood and fixed to the base of the City — in the shadow of the Downside, well away from the bright, fashionable sectors of the upper levels. It was just below the huge dynamos which powered the anchor-bands, and the deep, thrumming vibration of the machines above was a constant accompaniment to life for the Fishermen. The Harbor was a dark, hot, filthy place to work, and the contrast of the heat of the stoves, the grinding roar of the pistons and pulleys with the open Air of the upflux, made it all but unbearable for Farr.
Still, as his shift wore on, Farr relaxed into his work’s heavy, steady rhythms. He hauled the next massive length of tree trunk from the conveyor belt that ran continually behind the row of laborers. He was forced to wrestle with the chunk of wood; its inertia seemed to turn it into a willful, living thing, determined to plow its own path through the Air regardless of Farr’s wishes. The muscles in his arms and back bulged as he braced himself against the floor of the chamber and swung at the section of trunk with his ax of wood, hardened with a tip of Corestuff. The trunk was tough, but split easily enough if he swung the blade along the direction of the grain. When the split was deep enough, Farr forced his hands into the cracked wood and prized the trunk section open, releasing a flood of warmth and green light from the nuclear-burning interior which bathed his face and chest. Then, with the nuclear fire still bright, he dumped the hot fragments into the gaping maw of the hopper before him.
Cutting the wood was the part of his work Farr enjoyed the most, oddly. There was a certain skill to be applied in finding exactly the right spot for his ax blade, a skill Farr found pleasure in acquiring and applying. And when the wood split open under his coaxing, releasing its energy with a sigh of warmth, it was like revealing some hidden treasure.
A line of laborers worked alongside Farr, stretching almost out of sight in the gloom of the Harbor; working in shifts, they fed the ravenous maw of the hoppers unceasingly. The work was heavy, but not impossibly so for Farr, thanks to his upfluxer muscles. In fact, he had to take care not to work too fast; exceeding his quota didn’t earn him any popularity with his workmates.
The heat energy released by the wood’s burning nuclei was contained in great, reinforced vessels — boilers — in another part of the Harbor complex. Superfluid Air, fleeing the heat, was used to drive pistons. These pistons were immense fists of hardened wood twice Farr’s height which plunged into their jackets as steady as a heartbeat.
The pistons, via huge, splintered rotary arms, turned pulleys; and it was the pulleys which sent Bells full of fearful Fishermen toward the mysterious and deadly depths of the underMantle.
It was so different from his life with the Human Beings, where there were no devices more complex than a spear, no source of power save the muscles of humans or animals. The Harbor was like an immense machine, with the sole purpose of sending Fishermen down into the underMantle. He felt as if he were a component of that huge machine himself, or as if he were laboring inside the heart of some giant built of wood and rope…
Bzya apart, the other workers showed no signs of accepting Farr. It was as if their unhappiness with their lot, here in this noisy, stinking inferno, had been turned inward on themselves, and on each other. But still, once each new shift had settled in, the workers seemed to reach a certain rhythm, and a mood of companionship settled over the line — a mood which, Farr sensed, extended even to him, as long as he kept his mouth shut.
He missed Dura, and the rest of the Human Beings, and he missed his old life in the upflux. Of course he did. His sentence in this Harbor seemed to stretch off to eternity. But he was able to accept his lot, as long as he kept his mind focused on the task in hand, and took comforts where he could find them. One shift at a time, that was the secret, as Bzya had told him. And…
“You.”
There was a hand on his shoulder, grasping at his grubby tunic. He was roughly dragged out of the line.
Hosch glared at him, his nostrils glowing sickly-white. “Change of assignment,” he growled.
“What?”
“A Bell,” Hosch said.
As Dura approached — with twenty other new coolies in a huge car drawn by a dozen stout Air-pigs — Frenk’s ceiling-farm seemed tiny at first, a child’s palmprint against the immensity of the Crust itself. The other coolies seemed more interested in another farm, still more distant and harder to make out than Frenk’s. This belonged to Hork IV, Chair of Parz City, Dura was told. The absent-minded Chair escaped his civic responsibilities — leaving Parz in the scheming hands of his son — by indulging in elaborate agricultural experiments, here at the Crust. On Hork’s ceiling-farm there were said to be spears of wheat taller than a man, and Crust-trees no longer than a man’s arm and bound up with lengths of Corestuff-wire…
Dura was barely able to keep her attention focused on this prattle. The thought of being marooned at the Crust, with only these dullards for company, made her heart sink.
At last Frenk’s ceiling-farm filled the clearwood windows. The car settled to rest at the center of a group of crude wooden buildings, and the doors opened.
Dura scrambled out and Waved away from the others. She took a deep breath of clean, empty Air, relishing the sensation in her lungs and capillaries. The Air stretched away all around her, an immense, unbroken layer stretching right around the Star; it was like being inside the lungs of the Star itself. Well, the company might leave a bit to be desired, but at least here she could breathe Air which didn’t taste like it had been through the lungs of a dozen people already.
Qos Frenk himself was there to greet them. He picked out Dura, smiling with apparent kindness at her, and while the other coolies dispersed among the buildings, he offered to show Dura around his farm.
Frenk — dapper, round and sleek, his pink hair flowing over an elaborate cloak — Waved confidently beside her. “The work is straightforward enough, but it needs concentration and care… qualities, sadly, which not all coolies nowadays share. I’m sure you’ll do a fine job, my dear.”
Dura was wearing a coverall woven of some crude vegetable-fiber cloth, given to her as a parting gift by Ito. As she Waved it grated against her skin constantly, as if chafing her all over, and she longed to tear it off. On her back she carried a round pod of wood — an Air-tank, like the one she’d seen Toba wear, with a small mask she was supposed to fit over her face to help her breathe the rarefied Air of the upperMantle. The bulky, unnatural thing impeded her movement even more than the City-made clothes, but Frenk insisted she carry it. “Health ordinances, you see,” he had said with a philosophical shrug, his ornate cloak bunching around his thin shoulders.
Under the coverall, she still wore her length of rope and her small knife.
The farm had largely been cleared of tree trunks; the exposed forest root-ceiling was seeded with neat rows of green-gold wheat, of altered grass. Here, hovering just a few mansheights below the wafting, swollen tips of mutant grass, she could no longer see the boundaries of the farm. It was as if the Crust’s natural wildness had been banished, overrun by this claustrophobic orderliness.
Of course the orderliness covered only two dimensions. The third dimension led down to the clean, free Air of the Mantle which hung below her, huge and empty. The Parz folk had not yet succeeded in fencing off the Air itself… All she needed to do was to throw this Air-tank into the round, delicate face of Qos Frenk, and Wave away into infinity. These soft City-boms — even the coolies — could never catch her.