Well, she was up front. If anywhere was safe, it had to be up at the front where the navigators had the best view of the terrain.
After several minutes during which no calamity occurred, she began to relax, and for the first time was able to pay due attention to the bridge, which had been looming ahead all the while.
The caravan was moving in a southerly direction, towards the equator, along the eastern flank of Ginnungagap Rift. The bridge was still some way south. Perhaps it was her imagination, but she thought she could see the curvature of the world as the high wall of the Rift marched into the distance. The top was jagged and irregular, but if she smoothed out those details in her mind’s eye, it appeared to follow a gentle arc, like the trajectory of a satellite. It was very difficult to judge how distant the bridge was, or how wide the Rift was at this point. Although Rashmika recalled that the Rift was forty kilometres wide at the point where the bridge spanned it, the ordinary rules of perspective simply had no application: there were no visual cues to assist her; no intermediate objects to offer a sense of diminishing scale; no attenuation of detail or colour due to atmosphere. Although the bridge and the far wall looked vast and distant, they could as easily have been five kilometres away as forty.
Rashmika judged the bridge to be still some fifty or sixty kilometres away as the crow flies — more than two-hundredths of the circumference of Hela — but the road along the ledge took many twists and turns getting there. She could easily believe they had another hundred kilometres of travel to go before they arrived at the eastern approach to the bridge.
Still, at least now she could see it — and it was everything she had ever imagined. Everyone said that photographs could not even remotely convey the true essence of the structure. Rashmika had always doubted that, but now she saw that the common opinion was quite correct: to appreciate the bridge, it was necessary to see it.
What people appeared to find most dismaying about the bridge, Rashmika knew, was its very lack of strangeness. Disregarding its scale and the materials that had been used to build it, it looked like something transplanted from the pages of human history, something built on Earth, in the age of iron and steam. It made her think of lanterns and horses, duels and courtships, winter palaces and musical fountains — except that it was vast and looked as if it had been blown from glass or carved from sugar.
The upper surface of the bridge described a very gentle arc as it crossed from one side of the Rift to the other, and was at its highest in the middle. Apart from that it was perfectly flat, unencumbered by any form of superstructure. There were no railings on either side of the road bed, which was breathtakingly shallow — from her present angle it looked like a rapier-thin line of light. It appeared broken in places, until she moved her head slightly and the illumination shifted. Fifty kilometres away, and the movement of her head was enough to affect what she could see of the delicate structure! The span was indeed unsupported for most of its width, but at either end — reaching out to a distance of five or six kilometres from the walls — was a delicate tracery of filigreed stanchions. They were curled into absurd spirals and whorls, scroll-like flourishes and luscious organic involutes catching the light and throwing it back to her, not in white and silver, but in a prismatic shimmer of rainbow hues. Every tilt of her head shifted the colours into some new configuration of glories.
The bridge looked evanescent, as if one ill-judged breath might be sufficient to blow it away.
Yet they were actually going to cross it.
As soon as he had washed and breakfasted, Vasko set off to report for duty at the nearest Security Arm centre. He had slept for little more than four hours, but the alertness he had felt the night before was still there, stretched a little thinner and tighter. First Camp was deceptively quiet; the streets were littered with debris, some premises and dwellings had been damaged and the evidence of fires smouldered here and there, but the vast numbers of people he had seen the night before seemed to have vanished. Perhaps they had responded to Scorpio’s pronouncement after all and returned to their homes, having grasped how unpleasant it was going to be on the Nostalgia for Infinity.
Vasko realised his error as soon as he turned the corner next to the Security Arm compound. A huge grey mob was pressed up against the building, many hundreds of people crushed together with their belongings piled at their feet. A dozen or so SA guards were keeping order, standing on railed plinths with small weapons presented but not aimed directly at the crowd. Other Arm personnel, in addition to unarmed administration officials, were manning tables that had been set up outside the two-storey conch structure. Paperwork was being processed and stamped; personal effects were being weighed and labelled. Most of the people had obviously decided not to wait for the official rules: they were here, now, ready to depart, and very few of them looked as if they were having second thoughts.
Vasko made his way through the crowd, doing his best not to push and shove. There was no sign of Urton, but this was not her designated Arm centre. He stopped at one of the tables and waited for the officer manning it to finish processing one of the refugees.
‘Are they still planning to start flying them out at noon?’ Vasko asked quietly.
‘Earlier,’ the man replied, his voice low. ‘The pace has been stepped up. Word is we’re still going to have trouble coping.’
‘There’s no way that ship can accommodate all of us,’ Vasko said. ‘Not now. It’d take months to get us all into the sleep caskets.’
‘Tell that to the pig,’ the man said and went back to his work, stamping a sheet of paper almost without looking at it.
Sudden warmth kissed the back of Vasko’s neck. He looked up and squinted against the blinding-bright underside of a machine, an aircraft or shuttle sliding across the square. He expected it to slow and descend, but instead the machine curved away, heading beyond the shore, towards the spire. It slid under the clouds like a bright ragged flake of daylight.
‘See, they’ve already begun moving ’em out,’ the man said. ‘As if that’s going to make everyone else calmer…’
‘I’m sure Scorpio knows what he’s doing,’ Vasko said. He turned away before the man was able to answer.
He pushed beyond the processing tables, through the rest of the crowd, and into the conch structure. Inside, it was the same story: people squeezed in everywhere, holding paperwork and possessions aloft, children crying. He could feel the panic increasing by the minute.