But there was still something wrong. He was drifting downward through the hexagonal array of lines. He corrected his line of flight, pushed himself hard along the Magfield — but again there came that damnable drift downward. He felt confused, disoriented, as if his instincts were betraying him.
…No, he realized slowly; his instincts, his skill, were fine. He was holding his line. The vortex lines themselves were drifting upward, toward the Crust.
He was a City boy, but he knew what that meant.
The Mantle was expelling its rotational momentum. Glitch.
Suddenly, for the first time, he felt lost, vulnerable, alone in the sky. He couldn’t help but cry out, longing to be back in the remote wooden womb of Parz.
He forced himself to concentrate. He wasn’t in any direct danger yet. With luck, and skill, he could still get through this.
Still he pushed across the sky, keeping in line with the drifting vortex lines. But now he slowed a little, glancing around. He was virtually alone now; of the hundred starters in the race, perhaps thirty were still on their boards, paralleling his path through the Air. Of the rest — of the marshals — there was no sign. The City still hung in the Air like a dusty lantern, solid and unperturbed.
The vortex lines were drifting faster. They looked tangled, untidy. Looking more closely he saw instabilities searing along the lines from both upflux and downflux; the huge, complex waveforms passed through each other, seeming to drag and reinforce each other.
He looked over his shoulder at the far upflux. There the Air glowed yellow, empty. No vortex lines at all.
Now purple light flooded up through the Air, sudden, shocking, so that his board cast a shadow over his legs and arms. He leaned over his board, glanced down.
The Quantum Sea had exploded, right under the City; a neutrino fount rose steadily toward Parz, like an immense fist.
Resentment flooded Cris. No, he thought. Not today. Not on my day…
The Magfield surged again, ramming upward into his board with force and immediacy.
I was winning! Oh, I was winning!
Like a fragment of food swimming toward its own consumption, the crude wooden cylinder with its precious cargo of people and animals labored toward the unblemished mouth of the Ur-human artifact.
Dura worked with the Air-pigs, feeding and patiently soothing as their farts drove the turbine. To bring the “Pig” to the wormhole mouth Hork had taken the ship through a long, flat sweep to a position above one facet of the Interface. Through the wide windows she watched the wormhole gate sink briefly into the turgid glimmering of the underMantle, to reemerge as if surfacing as they approached it once more.
Now the Interface rose toward them, like an outstretched hand framed in the clearwood panel set into the base of the ship; within it light flashed, impossibly distant and vortex-line blue.
Hork worked his controls with savagery. For all his outer flippancy in the earlier stages of the voyage, he seemed to have become enraged since the encounter with Karen Macrae. Or perhaps that anger had been there in him all along, Dura thought; perhaps he had always resented the position of humans, left stranded and helpless in this Star. But now, for the first time, he had a focus for that rage: Karen Macrae, and her intangible Colonist companions in the Core of the Star.
Dura wondered at her own composure. She was fearful, yes; and an inner fluidity threatened to overwhelm her as she stared into the approaching maw of the wormhole. But at the same time, she realized, she was not confronting the unknown, as was Hork. The lore of the Human Beings was calm, detailed and analytical. The universe beyond the Star, the universe of the past beyond the here-and-now: those realms were abstract, remote, but they were as real to Dura as the world of Air, pigs, trees. Although she had never seen them she had grown up with the Xeelee and their works, with the artifacts of the Ur-humans, and to her they were no more exotic than the wild Air-boars of the Crust.
Perhaps, in the end, the lore of the Human Beings — their careful, almost obsessive, preservation of apparently useless knowledge from the past — was actually a survival mechanism.
The Interface was very close now, Dura saw; the fine, perfect vertices of the upper face spread away from the curving window of the ship, and the rest of the frame was foreshortened by perspective.
Then the clean lines of the artifact began to slide across the windows of the ship, as slow as knife-blades drawn across skin. The ship’s downward trajectory had been carrying it steadily toward the center of the face; but now they were clearly drifting, sliding toward one knife-sharp edge.
Something was wrong.
Hork hauled at his levers and slammed his hand into the fragile console. “Damn it. She won’t respond. The Magfield here is disrupted — maybe by the presence of the Interface — and…”
“Look!” Dura pointed downward.
Hork stared at the edge, its fizzing blue light painting deep, shifting shadows on his face as it approached. He swore. “It’s going to hit us.”
“We might be safe. Maybe the Ur-humans designed this wormhole to be as safe as possible; maybe the ship will just rebound, and…”
“Or maybe not. Maybe the Ur-humans didn’t expect anyone to be stupid enough to go careering through their doorway in a wooden ship. I think that damn thing is going to cut us in two.”
The Interface edge, wheeling past the windows, had widened from the abstraction of a line into a glowing rod as broad as a human arm.
Dura wrapped her arms around herself. Behind her the pigs were a comforting, warm mass, an oasis of familiarity. “At least try, damn you. Maybe you can get a purchase on the Interface’s magnetic field.”
Now, beyond the walls of the ship, there was a spectacular flash, a sudden storm of blue-white light which flooded the cabin and made her cry out. The pigs squealed, terrified again. The ship lurched. Hork rolled in his seat and Dura grabbed at the pigs’ restraining harness.
“We’ve hit!” she cried.
Hork dragged at his levers. “No. It’s the ship’s own field; it must be brushing against the edge… The ship’s responding. Dura, I think you’re right; I think we’re starting to work against the artifact’s field. Keep feeding those animals, damn you!”
The flashing persisted and the shuddering of the ship assumed a steady, violent rhythm. Dura clung to the pigs’ harness, striving to feed the pigs with an unwavering rhythm of her own.
Slowly, painfully slowly, the wheeling of the edge lessened, and the blue glare which had filled the cabin began to diminish. Dura glanced through the windows; the edge was receding and the magnetic flashes lessened, growing fitful and irregular, before dying completely.
The three edges of the face were all around the ship now, a fence of pale light slowly ascending past her. At last the ship was passing through the face, Dura realized; they were actually entering the Interface.
“Yes,” she murmured. “But we’re hardly safe.”
Hork raised his hands over the control panel. Then he pushed all three of his levers forward, deliberately; the ship surged forward into the Interface. She heard the hum of current in the Corestuff bands around the hull. “We go on,” Hork said.
Dura had expected to make out the blue lines of the Interface, this box of light, from the inside. But there was no sign of the other faces, the rest of the wormhole; instead, beyond the walls of the ship, there was only a darkness even deeper than the twilit glow of the underMantle. It was as if they were entering — not a box of light — but the mouth of a corridor, like one of Parz’s dingy alleys. In fact, it seemed that she could make out the lines of a corridor, stretching through the wormhole and on into infinity; black on black, it was like staring into a throat. Deep in the corridor there were flashes — sharp, silent and distant, light which splashed briefly over the dim walls. Slowly a picture assembled in her mind, each flash providing another fragment; the corridor was a smooth-walled cylinder perhaps five mansheights across and…