Quintus Fabius glared at him.
‘All right,’ the ColU said now. ‘Look down again, Mardina Eden Jones Guthfrithson. And look up. Look at the wall itself, down which we are climbing …’
It was more than a wall, she saw now, it was an engineered cliff face, crusted with structures, blocks and domes and pyramids – many essentially constructed of steel, Mardina thought, but ornately painted, even faced with stone and bound by steel straps. Structures – that was the wrong word. She saw lights gleam from within, doorways opening: these were buildings, inhabited by people. At the axial point itself a tremendous tower sprouted straight out from the wall, built of stone blocks of some kind: a stepped pyramid, skinny and enormously long. And in one place she saw a gang of workers, in pressure suits, tethered to handholds fixed to the wall, engaged on the construction of something new. A living, changing place then, a vertical town, stuck to this wall. And the rails on which the transport ran cut through all this clutter in a dead straight line before plunging down into the clouds far below.
Mardina uttered a silent prayer. ‘It is a city in the sky.’
‘No,’ said the ColU. ‘A city above the sky. We are in a near vacuum here, Mardina. The air will only become significantly dense perhaps twenty miles above the ground – I mean, above the cylindrical hull. This habitat, four hundred and fifty miles in diameter, essentially contains a vacuum, with a thin layer of air plastered over its inner surface, kept there by the spin gravity.’
‘A vast city in the vacuum. Why’s it here?’
The apu snorted. ‘Why do you think? This is Hanan Cuzco, home of the Inca himself, and his family and heirs and closest advisers. The greatest marvel in Yupanquisuyu, outshining even that dump Hurin Cuzco at the eastern pole. The mitimacs are kept out by all this lovely vacuum. Why, a war could be raging down there on the ground and we’d never know about it up here.’
‘ “We”, Ruminavi?’ said Quintus. ‘But you don’t live here, do you? It was my understanding that you’re coming with us, all the way to this grubby antisuyu, where you live.’
Ruminavi scowled. ‘Yes, and let’s see how long your Roman arrogance lasts in my jungle, you posturing clown.’
Mardina looked again at the compartment’s rear wall, the relatively comforting vision of a riveted metal wall flying up past her face. Hundreds of miles of metal, of steel and rivets … ‘All right, Collius. I think I’m ready for the next stage.’
‘Very well. Stay upright, feet down towards the ground – so to speak. When we are further from the axis the spin gravity will become stronger and pull you down. Now look straight ahead, lift your face slowly …’
If she had been in orbit around Terra, at this altitude the curve of the world would be apparent; she would find a horizon in every direction she looked. But here it was different. Here, when she lifted her head, she saw the panorama below her, of rivers and hills and inland seas and what looked like farms, what looked like cities, extending directly ahead, the details becoming a compressed blur with distance, until at last she saw only a band of air glowing with the illumination of the light pools. There was no sense of curvature – not if she looked straight ahead. But if she looked away from that axis, the landscape curved up, rising to either side and joining over her head to form a tube of smeared light, green and blue and grey. It was as if she was holding a rolled-up map, she thought, and peering through it at a distant source of light.
Far away, at least, it was all a comforting abstraction. But then she let her gaze wander back down the length of the tube, back to her position, and she looked up at a great roof of land, plastered with inverted mountains and patchwork farms and even rivers, pinned there by a spin weight she could not yet feel. She felt her heart hammering, her breath growing shallow.
The ColU said, ‘Easy, Mardina. Chu Yuen – hold her hand.’
The touch of the former slave’s flesh was comforting. But, glancing to her side, she saw that Chu had his own eyes clamped shut.
She laughed.
‘Are you all right, Mardina?’
‘Yes, Collius. A folded world. What magnificence. What arrogance. What madness!’
‘Quite. Yet here we are. Chu Yuen? What do you think?’
‘That I miss the stars,’ the slave said. ‘But I am now, however, standing on the floor of this box.’
He was right. Mardina hadn’t noticed. She was light as a feather still, but when she jumped, she drifted back down.
Ruminavi said, ‘Some way to go yet before we descend into the clouds. But we are already a tenth of the way there, and so you have a tenth your weight. We carry no refreshments, save water from that spigot over there …’
Mardina glanced around the transport, aware of her companions for the first time in a while. As their weight returned, the legionaries were pulling off their boots and settling down on their cloaks and blankets. Titus Valerius was playing knucklebones, or trying too, complaining loudly about the way the pieces rolled in the low weight. The medicus was huddled in a corner, obviously trying not to look terrified. One of the soldiers seemed to be taking a nap.
While the tube world unfolded all around them.
CHAPTER 42
It took two hours of descent before the transport compartment finally plunged down into the thicker clouds – although by now the blueness of the high air was visible beyond the walls.
Two hours: it was that fact alone, that this evidently high-speed transport had taken a whole two hours to cross a radius of one hub of this tremendous cylinder, that drove home to Mardina the sheer scale of the structure she was entering. It was already hundreds of miles back to the port where she had entered this habitat; it would not be rapid to travel anywhere in this great volume. At least now her weight felt comfortingly normal, even though the descent was not finished yet.
And when they passed through the high cloud layer, abruptly Mardina found herself looking down on mountains. Mountains that lapped up against the hub wall like a wave of rock breaking against the steel, mountains with ice clinging to their upper peaks and slopes, and glaciers spilling down their flanks.
The rail diverged from the wall now, though the transport box tipped up to stay vertical, and suddenly Mardina found herself skimming down an icebound slope of rock and frost-shattered scree. The landscape itself, at the foot of these mountains, was still far below.
‘This feels almost normal,’ she said.
Ruminavi grunted. ‘Until you remember there is a big band of these mountains all the way around the base of the hub wall.’
The ColU said, ‘Yes, of course – a mountain chain over a thousand miles long, like the mountains of Valhalla Inferior: South America, where the ancestors of these Incas arose. Folded up into a band!’
‘And all fake,’ Ruminavi said, grinning, trying to provoke a reaction – to awe them, Mardina realised. ‘Hollow! Built by engineers, shaped by artists! And inside the mountains there are big engines that circulate air and water and even stone, gravel and sand from the ocean.’
Mardina asked, ‘What ocean? Never mind.’
‘But look out at the spectacle …’
Abruptly the transport descended beneath the snow line, and now sped over bare rock. The view was giddy, with green-clad precipices falling away to the valleys of turbulent rivers below and those towering ice-clad peaks above, clawing at the metal face of the hub. Spectacular bridges spanned some of the gorges. And looking out now Mardina could see that some of the mountain’s face had been levelled into terraces, where people toiled; there were huts, fields, smoke rising from fires into the thin air. These were the first inhabitants of the cylinder they had seen since the hub.