The man opened a mouth devoid of teeth and laughed, but the woman laid a restraining hand on his arm. Her voice remained stern, but it softened a little. “Yes, I understand. And you’re right; it is an Interface — from the olden days, from before the Core Wars. But you can’t use it.”
Philas was trembling. “We’ll pay,” she said wildly. “You must…”
Mur grabbed her shoulders and tried to still her shivering with his own inertia. “Stop it, Philas. Don’t you understand? Even if we could pay, the Interface doesn’t work any more. These people are as helpless as we are.”
Philas stared into his face resentfully, then turned away; her body was wracked by shuddering.
The man and woman watched them curiously.
Mur turned to them wearily. “Why don’t you put away your weapons? You can see we’re no threat to you.”
They lowered their spears carefully, but kept them aimed roughly in the direction of the Human Beings. The man said, “You really are refugees from further upflux?”
“Yes. And we really are trying to reach a place called Parz City, which we’ve never seen. But it’s at the Pole.”
“Which Pole?” the woman asked. “The South Pole?”
The man cackled. “If you’re starting from here it hardly matters, does it?”
“Oh, shut up, Borz,” the woman said.
Mur put his arm around Philas. “Will you let us see your Interface?”
To his shame, he read amused pity in the woman’s expression. “If you want,” she said. “But stay close to the two of us. Do you understand? We see enough thieves and beggars…”
“We’re no beggars,” Philas said with a spark of spirit. She drew away from Mur and pulled her shoulders straight.
“Come, then.”
Borz and the woman turned away from them and separated by a couple of mansheights. Hand in hand, Mur and Philas Waved cautiously forward.
Soon they were approaching the artifact, shepherded by spears and scowls.
Mur squeezed Philas’s hand. “You should have said we weren’t thieves,” he whispered. “I was thinking of trying a little begging.”
She managed a small laugh. “It wouldn’t have worked. These people have no more than we have… or had, before we lost our home.” She pointed at Borz, to their left. “Look at the hat he’s wearing.”
The hat’s brim was piled with pleats of fine material, knotted into place by ties fixed through holes in the leather of the hat. Mur imagined undoing those ties; perhaps a kind of net would drop down, around the head.
“It’s odd, but what about it?”
“Remember Dura’s tales of her time on the ceiling-farm. The Air-tanks they made her wear, working high up, close to the Crust. The masks…”
“Oh. Right.” Mur nodded. “Those hats must have come from coolies’ Air-tanks.”
“So my guess is these people used to be coolies. Maybe they ran away.”
“But they ought to know about Parz.”
Philas laughed without humor. She seemed in control of herself again, but her mood was black. “So they are concealing things from us. Well, we lied to them. That’s what the world is like, it seems.”
Mur stared at Borz’s hat. Apart from Deni Maxx’s Air-car it was the first artifact even remotely related to the City he’d ever seen. And recognizing it now from Dura’s description somehow lent veracity to Dura’s bizarre tale. He felt oddly reassured by the confirmation of this small detail, as if somewhere inwardly he’d imagined Dura might be lying, or mad.
The people turned to stare, suspicious and hostile, as the Human Beings were brought into the encampment by Borz and his companion. There seemed to be around forty humans in the little colony, perhaps fifteen of them children and infants. The adults were fixing clothes, mending nets, sharpening knives, lounging in the Air and talking. Children wriggled around them like tiny rays, their bare skins crackling with electron gas. None of it would have looked out of place in any of the Human Beings’ encampments, Mur thought.
The tetrahedral artifact loomed beyond the small-scale human activities. It was a skeletal framework, incongruous, sharp, dark.
Borz and the woman hung back as Mur and Philas hesitantly approached the tetrahedron’s forbidding geometries. Mur peered up at the framework. The edges were poles a little thicker than his wrist, each about ten mansheights long. They were precisely machined of some dull, dark substance. The four triangular faces defined by the edges enclosed nothing but ordinary Air — in fact, the people here had slung sections of net to enclose a small herd of squabbling, starved-looking Air-pigs at the framework’s geometric center. Elsewhere on the framework rough bags had been fixed by bits of rope; irregular bulges told Mur that the bags probably contained food, clothes and tools.
Mur moved forward, reached out a tentative hand and laid his palm against one edge. The material was smooth, hard and cold to the touch. Maybe this was the Corestuff of which Dura had spoken, extracted from the forbidding depths of the underMantle by City folk (and now, unimaginably, by the boy Farr whom Mur had grown up with).
Philas asked, “Can we go inside?”
The woman laughed. “Of course you can. Your friend was right… nothing works, any more.”
The man grunted to Mur. “We’d hardly keep our pigs in there if they were going to be whisked off to the North Pole at any moment.”
“I imagine not.”
Philas passed cautiously through one face of the tetrahedron. Mur saw her shiver as she crossed the invisible plane marked by the edges. She hovered close to the pigs and turned in the Air, peering into the corners of the tetrahedron.
The man — Borz — grunted. “Oh, what the hell.” He dug into one of the bags dangling on the tetrahedral frame and extracted a handful of food. “Here.”
Mur grabbed the food. It was stale, slightly stinking Air-pig flesh. Mur allowed himself one deep bite before stuffing the rest into his belt. “Thank you,” he said around the mouthful of food. “I can see you’ve little to spare.”
The woman drifted closer to him. “Once,” she said slowly, “this frame sparkled blue-white. As if it was made of vortex lines. Can you imagine it? And it really was a wormhole Interface; you could pass through it and cross the Mantle in a heartbeat.” For a moment she sounded sad — nostalgic for days she’d never seen — but now her dismissive expression returned. “So they say, anyway. But then the Core Wars came…”
After raising several generations of Human Beings, the Colonists had suddenly withdrawn. According to the Human Beings’ fragmented oral histories the Colonists had retreated into the Core, taking most of the marvelous Ur-human technology with them, and destroying anything they were forced to leave behind.
The Human Beings had been left stranded in the Air, helpless, with no tools save their bare hands.
Perhaps the Colonists had expected the Human Beings to die off, Mur wondered. But they hadn’t. Indeed, if Dura’s tales of Parz and its hinterland were accurate, they had begun to construct a new society of their own, using nothing but their own ingenuity and the resources of the Star. A civilization which — if not yet Mantle-wide — was at least on a scale to bear comparison with the great days of the ancients.
“The wormholes collapsed,” the woman said. “Most of the Interfaces were taken away into the Core. But some of them were left behind, like this one. But its vortex-light died. Now it just drifts around in the Magfield…”
“I wonder what happened to the people inside the wormholes,” Mur said. “When the holes collapsed.”