Muub listened to Adda’s clumsy expression of this. “But it’s inevitable,” he said, his face neutral. “You have to have organization — hierarchy — if you are to run the complex, interlinking systems which sustain a society like the City with its hinterland. And only within such a society can man afford art, science, wisdom — even leisure of the most brutish sort, like these Games. And with hierarchies comes power.” He smiled at Adda, condescending once more. “People aren’t very noble, upfluxer. Look around you. Their darker side will find expression in any situation where they can best each other.”
Adda remembered times in the upflux, when he was young, and the world was less treacherous than it had become of late. He recalled hunting-parties of five or six men and women, utterly immersed in the silence of the Air, their senses open, thrilling to the environment around them. Completely aware and alive, as they worked together.
Muub was an observer, he realized. Believing he was above the rest of mankind, but in fact merely detached. Cold. The only way to live was to be yourself, in the world and in the company of others. The City was like a huge machine designed to stop its citizens doing just that — to alienate. No wonder the young people clambered out of the cargo ports and lived on the Skin, riding on the Air by wit and skill. Seeking life.
The light had changed. The rich yellow of the Air over the Pole seemed brighter. Puzzled, he turned his head toward the upflux.
There was a buzz of anticipation from the Box, answered by a buzz from the Stadium. Muub touched Adda’s arm and pointed upward. “Look. The Surfers. Do you see them?”
The Surfers were a hexagonal array, shining motes scattered across the Air. Even Muub, despite his detachment, seemed thrilled as he stared up, evidently wondering how it would be to ride the flux so high, so far from the City.
But Adda was still troubled by the light change. He scoured the horizon, cursing the distortion of the clearwood wall before him.
Then he saw it.
Far upflux, far to the north, the vortex lines had disappeared.
Its — her — name was Karen Macrae. She had been born in a place called Mars, a thousand years ago.
That’s Earth-standard years, she said. Which are about half of Mars’ years, of course. But they’re the same as your years… We designed your body-clocks to match the standard human metabolic rate, you see, and we got you to count the rhythms of the neutron star so that we have a common language of days, weeks, years… We wanted you to live at the same rate as us, to be able to communicate with us. Karen Macrae hesitated. With them, I mean. With standard humans.
Dura and Hork looked at each other. He hissed, “How much of this do you understand?”
Dura stared at Karen Macrae. The floating image had drifted away from the center of the cabin, now, and seemed to be growing coarser; it was not a single image, in fact, but a kind of mosaic formed by small, jostling cubes of colored light. Dura asked, “Are you an Ur-human?”
Karen Macrae fizzed. A what? Oh, you mean a standard human. No, I’m not. I was, though…
Karen Macrae and five hundred others had come to the Star from — somewhere else. Mars, perhaps, Dura thought. They had established a camp outside the Star. When they’d arrived the Star had been empty of people; there were only the native lifeforms — the pigs, the rays, the spin-spiders and their webs, the Crust-trees.
Karen Macrae had come to populate the Star with people.
The structure of a neutron star is astonishingly rich, whispered Karen Macrae. Do you realize that? I mean, the Core is like a huge, single nucleus — a hypernucleus, laced with twenty-four percent hyperonic matter. And it’s fractal. Do you know what that means? It has structure on all scales, right down to the…
“Please.” Hork held up his hands. “This is a storm of words, conveying — nothing.”
The blocks of Karen’s face jostled like small insects. I am a first-generation Colonist, she said. We established a Virtual environment in the hypernucleus — in the Core. I was downloaded via a tap out of my corpus callosum — downloaded into the environment here, in the Core. Karen Macrae brought veils of skin down over the pulpy, obscene things nestling in her eyecups. Do you understand me?
Hork said slowly, “You are — a copy. Of an Ur-human. Living in the Core.”
Dura said, “Where is the Ur-human Karen Macrae? Is she dead?”
She’s gone. The ship left, once we were established here. I don’t know where she is now… Dura tried to detect emotion in the woman-thing’s voice — was she resentful of the original who had made her, who had thrust her into the Core of the Star? Was she envious? — but the quality of the voice was coarse, too harsh to tell; Dura was reminded of the Speaker system on Toba Mixxax’s Air-car.
The colony of human copies, downloaded into the Core, had devices which interfaced with the physical environment of the Star, the woman-thing told them. They had a system to produce something called exotic matter; they laced the Mantle with wormholes, linking Pole to Pole, and they built a string of beautiful cities.
When they’d finished, the Mantle was like a garden. Clean, empty. Waiting.
Dura sighed. “Then you built us.”
“Yes,” Hork said. “Just as our fractured history tells us. We are made things. Like toys.” He sounded angry, demeaned.
The world had been at peace. There had been no need to struggle to live. There were no Glitches (few, anyway). The downloaded Colonists, still residing in the Core, had been there for the Human Beings like immortal, omniscient parents.
One could Wave from upflux to Pole, through the wormhole transit ways, in a heartbeat.
Hork pushed forward, confronting the woman-thing. “You expected us to come here, to seek you.”
We hoped you would come. We could not come to you.
“Why?” He seemed to be snarling now, Dura thought, unreasonably angry at this ancient, fascinating woman-shell. “Why do you need us now?”
Karen Macrae turned her head. The light-boxes drifted, colliding noiselessly — no, Dura saw, they drifted through each other, as smoothly as if they were made of colored Air.
The Glitches, she said slowly. They are damaging the Core… they are damaging us.
Dura frowned. “Why don’t you stop them?”
We haven’t a physical Interface any more. We withdrew it. Karen’s voice was growing more indistinct, her component blocks larger; the form of a human was gradually being submerged in loss of detail.
Hork pushed himself forward from the cabin wall, his heavy hands outspread against the wood. “Why? Why did you withdraw? You built us, and took away our tools, and abandoned us. You waged war against us; you took our treasures, our heritage. Why? Why?”
Karen turned to him, her mouth open, purple boxes streaming from her coarsely defined lips. She expanded and blurred, the boxes comprising her image swelling.
Hork threw himself at the image. He entered it as if it were no more than Air. He batted at the drifting, crumbling light-boxes with his open palms. “Why did you make us? What purpose did we serve for you here? Why did you abandon us?”
The boxes exploded; Dura quailed from a monstrous, ballooning image of Karen Macrae’s face, of the pale forms infesting her eyecups. There was a soundless concussion, a flood of purple light which filled the cabin before fleeing through the walls of the ship and into the ocean beyond. The human-thing, the simulacrum of Karen Macrae, was gone. Hork twisted in the Air, punching at emptiness in his frustration.
But there were new shadows in the cabin now, blue-green shadows cast by something behind Dura. Something outside the ship. She turned.