Toba placed his hands on the girl’s shoulders. “Lea, Lea. You shouldn’t speak to our friends like that.”
“Friends?” The girl launched into an impressive round of cursing. Toba looked pale and pulled away from her, dismayed.
Dura took the rope which Lea was rejecting. “Perhaps Mur didn’t explain,” she said smoothly. “You have to double plait the rope to give it extra strength.” She hauled at sections of it, demonstrating its toughness.
“But the way he speaks to me — ”
“This plaiting is finely done.” She looked at Lea. “Did you do this?”
“Yes, but — ”
Dura smiled. “It takes most Human Beings years of practice to learn such a skill, and you’ve almost mastered it already.”
Lea, distracted by the praise, was visibly struggling to stay angry; she pushed elaborately dyed hair from her forehead.
Dura passed the rope to her. “With a bit more help from Mur, I’ll be coming to you for instruction. Come on, Toba, let’s take a break; I’d like to see how Adda is getting on.”
As they moved away Dura was careful not to make a show of looking around, but she could see that Mur and Lea were moving back toward each other, warily, and picking up sections of rope once more.
She felt rather smug at her success at defusing the little situation. And she was secretly pleased at this evidence that the Human Beings were managing to adjust to the situation they’d found here at the Pole — better than some of Parz’s former inhabitants, it seemed. Dura had expected the Human Beings to be shocked, disappointed to arrive at the Pole after their epic journey across the sky, only to find nothing more than a dispersing cloud of rubble. In fact they’d reacted with much more equanimity than she’d anticipated… especially once reunited with their children. The Human Beings simply hadn’t known what to expect here. They couldn’t have imagined Parz in all its glory — any more than she herself could have, before Toba brought her here for the first time. For the little band of Human Beings, the immense number of people, the huge, mysterious engines, the precious artifacts scattered almost carelessly through the Air, had been wonder enough.
One section of the rough, expanding City-cloud had been cordoned off, informally, to serve as a Hospital area. Dura and Toba pushed through the cloud of debris until they were moving through arrays of patients, drifting comfortably in the Air and loosely knotted together with lengths of rope. Dura cast a cursory, slightly embarrassed glance at the patients. Many people had been left so damaged by the Glitch that they would never function fully again; but the care they were receiving was clearly competent. The bandaging and splints seemed undamaged and clean. One of the blessings of the destruction of Parz was that its scale had been so immense many smaller, more robust items in the City — like medical equipment — had simply been spilled into the Air, undamaged.
As they neared the heart of the improvised Hospital, Muub, once Court Physician, emerged to meet them. Muub had abandoned his impractical finery, replacing it with what looked like a Fisherman’s many-pocketed smock. His smile was broad and welcoming beneath his shining bare scalp, and the Physician looked as happy as Dura could remember seeing him — liberated, even.
Muub led them to Adda. The old upfluxer was standing a sullen guard over an outsized, sealed cocoon. Dura knew that the cocoon contained Bzya, the crippled Fisherman, who still could do little more than bellow half-coherent phrases from his ruin of a mouth. Bzya was evidently asleep. But Adda seemed content to spend much of his waking time with his friend, keeping watch over him and serving as a clumsy nurse when necessary, helping Jool and their daughter — Shar, who had returned from the ceiling-farms — to tend to him.
Adda embraced Dura, and asked after the rest of the Human Beings. Dura told him about Mur and Lea, and Muub added, “There are points of friction. But your upfluxers are working well with the citizens of Parz. Don’t you agree, Adda?”
The old man growled, his face as sour as ever. “Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe we’re ‘fitting in’ too damn well.”
Dura smiled. “You’re too much of a cynic, dear Adda. Nobody forced the Human Beings to come here, to help the City folk dig their way out of the rubble.”
“Although we’re delighted you’re here,” Muub said expansively. “Without your upflux-hardened muscles we wouldn’t be making half the progress we’ve managed so far.”
“Sure. As long as we’re not using our ‘upflux-hardened muscles’ to build another nice, neat cage for ourselves.”
Dura said, “Now, Adda — ”
Toba Mixxax said nervously, “But you were never in a cage. I don’t understand.”
Muub held up his hands. “Adda has a point. And while we’re rebuilding our City, it’s a time to think about rebuilding our hearts as well. The Human Beings were in a cage, Toba. As were we alclass="underline" a cage of ignorance, prejudice and suppression.”
Dura looked at him carefully. “You genuinely accept that?”
“Do we need a City at all?” Adda asked sourly. “Maybe it’s time for a fresh start without one.”
Dura shook her head. “I don’t think I agree with that. Not any more. The benefits of a City — stability, a repository of understanding, the access to medicine — all of these will help us all, everyone in the Mantle.” She fixed Muub with a sharp glance. “Won’t they?”
He nodded seriously. “We could never advance from a base of subsistence farming. But the City must never again become a fortress-prison. That’s why we’re planning a whole series of satellite communities, with the City as the hub. We should not trap most of humanity in one place, so vulnerable to disasters from without — and from our own hearts.”
Adda snorted. “You talk about human nature. What’s to stop human nature from reasserting itself where prisons and fortresses are concerned?”
“Only the strong and continuing efforts of good men and women,” Muub said evenly. “Hork shares these goals. He’s talking about new kinds of power structures — representative councils which would give all of the Mantle’s people a say in the way things are run.”
“Knowing Hork,” Dura admitted, “I find that a little hard to swallow.”
“Then try harder,” Muub said sternly. “Hork is no sentimental dreamer, Dura. He faces realities and acts on them. He knows that without the ancient wisdom of the Human Beings — without the clues you people brought about the Core Wars, the possibility of retrieving some of the ancient technology — the City would have been wiped out by the Xeelee attack, without even knowing why. Perhaps the race itself would have perished… We need each other. Hork accepts that, and is going to make sure we don’t lose what we’ve gained. Surely his litany, today, is evidence of his goodwill. Perhaps we could construct a new, integrated philosophy, incorporating the best elements of all these strands — the Xeelee philosophy, the Wheel followers — and build a new faith to guide us…”
Dura laughed. “Maybe. But we’ll have to put the City back together first.”
Adda rubbed his nose. “Perhaps. But I don’t think we’ll have Farr here to help us.”
“No,” Dura said. “He’s determined to return to the Quantum Sea, in a new, improved ‘Flying Pig.’ To find the Colonists again. But he’s accepted he needs to put in some time rebuilding his own world first, before flying off to win new ones…”
“Not a poor ambition to have,” Muub said, smiling thinly. “Quite a number of us are intrigued by what you learned of the Colonists… and the huge Ur-human engines at the North Pole. Of course, we don’t know any way of traveling more than a few tens of meters from the South Pole, let alone of crossing the Equator… but we’ll find a way.”
“Why should there be a way at all?” Adda asked cynically. “This Star is a hostile environment, remember. The Glitches have forced that home into our heads, if nothing else. We’ve no guarantee we’ll ever be able to achieve much more than we can do now. After all the Ur-humans left us to die with the Star, they didn’t believe in any future for us.”