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 over her head 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 to, 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.
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 realized. “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 leveled 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.
“Potato farmers,” the ColU said. “Just as in the Andes in the time of the Incas. Our Incas. There they farmed all the way up to the snow line.”
Ruminavi frowned at the unfamiliar names. But he said, “Just as in the old country, we built mountains here as residences for our gods. The country is littered with shrines.”
“Yes, the Incas came from the highlands,” Mardina said. “I remember that from my own history, of what the Xin and the Romans found when they fought over Valhalla Inferior. There had been a mighty empire spanning the continent, but armed only with bronze swords and armor of leather…”
“Just as the Europeans of my UN-China Culture discovered,” the ColU said. “And destroyed. Here, however, the Incas evidently prospered. They destroyed Rome, they went out into space, and they brought their culture with them—indeed, they re-created it. Andean mountains, built of lunar rock perhaps.
“Inguill called this habitat Yupanquisuyu, which means the Country of Yupanqui. And Cusi Yupanqui, at least in my Culture’s timeline, was the man who truly established the Inca empire. He conquered vast swaths of territory, and established the empire’s legal, military and social structures. Yupanqui was their Alexander the Great, and it is as if this vast habitat is called ‘Alexandria.’ So Yupanqui must have lived here too, in this reality; the histories must have been roughly consistent until that point—though, evidently, Rome survived to be defeated. I need to see the quipus, you know.”
“The what?”
“The frame of strings that quipucamayoc Inguill carried. That was, and evidently still is, the way the Incas kept their records. Somewhere in this artifact there must be a library, banks of knotted strings telling the story of this empire all the way back to Yupanqui himself. If only I could see it…”
Quintus Fabius had been listening. He said drily, “I’ll see what can be arranged, Collius. In the meantime it seems to me that this box of glass is slowing.”
In the last moments, the transport entered another, lower bank of clouds that blanketed a green-tinged landscape.
Instructed by Ruminavi, the passengers picked up their gear and lined up by a side door. The axis warriors from the hub, fragile-looking in gravity, remained carefully strapped into their couches, but they kept the blunt muzzles of their ugly-looking weapons trained on the Romans. Meanwhile, waiting outside the door was another squad of soldiers to take over their supervision, heftier-looking types, their clothing gaudy, their dark faces stern and suspicious.