“To stop the Xeelee destroying us?” He shrugged. “I don’t know, Dura. But we’ve done all we can.”
Dura looked at Hork, seeing a match in his broad face for her own sense of bewilderment, of anticlimax.
Hork held out his hand. “Come. We need to rest, I think, after such epic deeds. Let’s return to our wooden ship. We’ll eat, and try to relax.”
She allowed him to pull her out of the chair. Hand in hand, they Waved back to the inner tetrahedron.
As they entered it, Dura made her way toward the “Pig’s” open hatchway; but Hork held her arm. “Dura. Wait; look at this.”
She turned. He was pointing to the map on the inner wall of the tetrahedron — the map-Star, the wormhole diagram they had studied earlier. One of the wormhole routes — a path which snaked from the Core of the Star to its Crust, at the North Pole — was flashing, slowly and deliberately.
Hork nodded slowly. “I think I understand. This is how the Star-fount was made.” He traced the wormhole with a fingertip. “See? When you hauled on your levers, Dura, this wormhole must have opened up. It took matter from the heart of the Star and transported it to the Crust. The Core material must have exploded at once in the lower pressure, releasing immense energy.”
Dura felt odd; she seemed to see Hork as if at the far end of a long, dark corridor.
“At the North Pole there must be huge engines to exploit this energy — the discontinuity drive engines Karen Macrae spoke of, which propel the Star itself.” His gaze was distant. “Dura, some day we must reach those engines. And I wonder how the Colonists fared, when that wormhole belched…”
In Dura’s eyes all the color had leeched from Hork’s face; even the lurid map on the tetrahedron wall had turned to shades of brown, and there was a strange, thin taste on her tongue.
She was exhausted, she realized. There would be time enough in the future for plans and dreams. For now, she longed for the comparative familiarity and security of the “Pig,” for food and sleep.
The rich, sweet stink of Air-pigs greeted her as she reached the ship’s entrance.
He touched Farr’s arm. “Wait. We stop here. That’s enough.”
Farr looked confused. He Waved through a couple more strokes, as if automatically; then, uncertainly, his legs came to rest. He released his grip on the cocoon material and looked down at his hands, which were bent into stiff claws.
Adda let himself drift away from the cocoon and hang in the Air, giving way to his fatigue for the first time since the start of the disaster. The Magfield supported him, but he could feel its continuing shudders. The aches in his legs, arms, back and hands had gone beyond mere fatigue, beyond exhaustion now, he realized, and had transmuted into real pain. He inflated his chest, hauling in dank Polar Air, and felt the thick stuff burn at his lungs and capillaries. He remembered the dire warnings of poor, lost Deni Maxx: that after his encounter with the Air-sow his body would never regain its pneumatic efficiency. Well, this day he’d tested that diagnosis to its limits.
The City was a battered wooden box almost small enough to be covered over by the palm of a hand, with the long, elegant Spine spearing down from its base to the underMantle. A cloud diffused around the upper City, a mist of rubble and dispersing refugees.
The Xeelee starbreakers continued to walk through the Mantle. Vortex strings hailed all around them, deadly and banal.
He felt his eyes close; weariness and pain lapped over his mind, shutting out the world. This was the worst part of growing old: the slow, endless failure of his body that was slowly isolating him from the world, from other people, immersing him instead in a tiny, claustrophobic universe of his own weakness. Even now, even with the Mantle in its greatest crisis…
Well, a small, sour part of him thought, at least I won’t grow any older, to find out how much worse it gets.
“…Adda.” There was more wonder than fear in Farr’s voice. “Look at the City.”
Adda looked at the boy, then turned his aching neck to the distant tableau of Parz.
The City had already drifted far from its usual site directly over the Magfield Pole, tilting and twisting slowly as it traveled. Now that drift was accelerating. Parz, with all its precious freight of life, swung through the Air like a huge spin-spider. It was oddly graceful, Adda thought, like a huge dance. Then there was a cracking noise, a sharp sound which traveled even to this distance, uneasily like breaking bone. Wood fragments burst around the junction of the City and its Spine — splinters which must be the size of Air-cars to be visible at this distance.
The Spine had snapped off.
The Spine remained suspended in the depths of the Polar Magfield, like an immense, battered tree trunk. The Spine must have been supplying much of the City’s residual anchoring in the Magfield, for now the box-like upper section of Parz, with green wood-lamp light still gleaming from its ports, rolled forward like an immense, grotesque parody of a lolling head.
The structure could not long stand such stress.
The Corestuff anchor-bands, dull and useless, folded, snapped and fell away in huge pieces. The clearwood bubble which enclosed the Stadium burst outward, popping. The Palace buildings on the upper surface, like elaborately colored toys with their miniature forests and displays, slid almost gracefully away into the Air, exposing the bare wooden surface beneath.
And now the City itself opened, coming apart like rotten wood.
The carcass split longitudinally, almost neatly, around the central structural flaw of Pall Mall. From the cracked-open streets and shops and homes, Air-cars and people spilled into the Air. The Market opened up like a spin-spider’s egg, and the huge execution Wheel tumbled out into the Air.
The sounds of cracking wood, of twisting Corestuff, carried through the Air, mercifully drowning the cries of the humans.
Adda tried to imagine the terror of those stranded citizens; perhaps some of them had never ventured beyond the Skin before, and now here they were cast into the Air, helpless amid clouds of worthless possessions.
Now the residual structure of Parz imploded into fragments. All traces of the City’s shape were lost. The cloud of rubble, of wood, Corestuff and struggling people, drifted through the Air away from the amputated Spine, slowly diffusing.
Adda closed his eyes. There had been a grandeur about that huge death. Almost a grace, a defiance of the Xeelee’s actions which had been, in its way, magnificent.
“Adda.” Farr was pulling at his arm and pointing.
Adda followed the boy’s finger. At first he could see nothing — only the lurid crimson glow around the Northern horizon, the yellow chaos of the Air…
Then he realized that the boy was pointing out an absence.
The starbreaker beams were gone.
Adda felt something lift from his heart. Perhaps some of them might yet live through this.
But then more vortex fragments came gusting toward them, precluding thought; gripping the boy’s hand as hard as he could, Adda stared into the mouth of the storm and grabbed at Bzya’s cocoon.
28
The Interface was glowing.
The shouting woke Borz from a deep, untroubled sleep. He stretched and scowled around, looking for the source of the trouble. He reached to his belt and pulled out his Air-hat, jammed it on his head. He didn’t really need the hat, of course, but he thought it gave him a bit more authority with the scavenging, thieving upfluxers who came by all the time and…
The Interface was glowing. The edges around its four triangular faces were shining, vortex-line-blue, so bright he was forced to squint. And the faces themselves seemed to have been covered over by a skin of light, fine and golden, which returned reflections of the yellow Mantle-light, the vortex lines, his own bulky body.