It turned out to be ten hours before the first stop—ten hours in fact before they reached the end of the altiplano. Since the ColU estimated that the train, running without a break, was averaging sixty Roman miles an hour, that gave Mardina another impression of the sheer scale of this artifact into whose interior she was busy tunneling.
When the train finally slowed, night was falling across Yupanquisuyu. Mardina supposed they must fortuitously have been brought to the hub from space in the early morning. She wondered vaguely how the mirror mechanisms worked behind the Inti windows, deflecting away the unending sunlight to emulate nightfall.
They got out at a waystation, which Ruminavi called a chuclla. Here there was a kind of refectory, and a place to wash, and shops where you could obtain food or even fresh clothes, and dormitory blocks—but the apu said they would not stay long before the train resumed its journey, with a fresh crew; they could sleep on the train, or not. Anyhow, the grumbling legionaries had none of the credit tokens you needed to buy stuff at the shops. The Inca soldiers laughed at their frustration.
This small hub of industry and provision was set in the astounding panorama of Yupanquisuyu.
As the Romans bickered around the shops, Mardina once more walked alone, away from the station. Though by now it was evidently full night in the habitat, it was not entirely dark; the residual glow seeping from the light pools was clear and white, but so faint that colors were washed out. It was like the moonlight of Terra, Mardina thought, and no doubt that was by deliberate design. She could make out the sleeping landscape all around her, the terraces and fields. A little way ahead, though, the country began to break up into hills and valleys that were lakes of shadows. They would be descending soon, then, to lower country, and thicker air.
And to the left and right, the uplift of the landscape was easily visible, even in the night. The ColU had told her that a round world with the curvature of this cylinder would have a horizon only a mile away, compared to three miles on Terra. So, well within a mile, she could see the land tipping up, the trees and houses visibly tilted toward her. And the rise went on and on—there was no horizon, only the mist of distance—until the land became a tremendous slope, bearing rivers and lakes at impossible angles. Soon the detail was lost in darkness, and in the thickness of the faintly misty air. But then, as she raised her eyes further, she saw the roof of the world, an inverted landscape glowing with pinpricks of light. It looked like the dark side of a world as seen from space, with threads of roads and the spark of towns clearly visible beyond its own layer of air and clouds. At this altitude the air was so clear it was as if she were looking through a vacuum.
The apu joined her. He was chewing some kind of processed green leaf; he offered her some, but, moving subtly away from him, she declined. He said, “Quite a sight if you’re not used to it. And even if you are, it astounds you sometimes.”
“It doesn’t look like the other side of a cylinder. It’s like another world suspended over this one.”
The ColU murmured in her ear, “That’s natural. The human eye was evolved for spying threats and opportunities in the horizontal plain, and so vertical perceptions are distorted—”
“Hush,” she murmured.
Ruminavi looked at her quizzically.
She said, “I can see we’ll be coming down from the puna soon.”
“Yes. Which is why they put this chuclla here. The last stop before the descent. A place to acclimatize to the thinner air, if you’re coming the other way.”
“And the land below…”
“It’s a kind of coastal strip. The rivers pour down off the puna and spread out, and you have sprawling valleys, immense deltas. Very fertile country, nothing but farmers and fishers. They grow peppers, maize. Should take us half the time we traveled already to cross.”
“Five more hours? And then what? You said a coastal strip. The coast of what?”
“Why, of the ocean. Goes all the way around the waist of the world.” He pointed to the sky, in the direction they’d been traveling, the direction he and his soldiers called east. “You can see it at night sometimes. Spectacular by day, of course. We’ll be crossing by the time the sun comes up.”
“Crossing it?”
“It’s spanned by bridges, for the railway, other traffic. We’ll go rattling across it without even slowing down.”
“How long to cross the ocean?”
“Oh, it’ll be getting dark again by the time we reach the eastern shore.”
The times, the distances, were crushing her imagination. Fifteen, twenty hours more, and she would still be traveling within the belly of the artifact. “And beyond the ocean?”
“Ah, then we come to the antisuyu. The eastern country, all of this side of the ocean being the western, the cuntisuyu. And if you went on all the way to the eastern hub, it would be another fifteen hours.”
“But we won’t be going that far.”
“Oh, no. Only five, six hours to home. My home and yours.”
“Which is? What’s it like?”
“Jungle. Hacha hacha. You’ll see.” He grinned, his teeth white in the pale light. He held out his leaves again. “You sure you won’t have some of this coca? Makes life a lot easier to bear…”
She shook her head, and once more backed away from him. He followed, ineffectual, evidently drawn to her but, thankfully, lacking the courage or guile to do anything about it.
43
On Per Ardua, that first “night” after Beth and Earthshine came through the Hatch, it rained for twelve hours solid.
The sound of the rain on the tough fabric of her shelter was almost reassuring, for Beth. Almost like a memory of her own childhood, when, as her family had tracked the migration of the builders and their mobile lake her mother had called the jilla, they had stayed in structures that were seldom much more permanent than this.
But no matter how familiar this environment felt to her, Beth was painfully aware that she was alone here, save for an artificial being that seemed to be becoming increasingly remote—even if he was, in some sense, her grandfather. “And that’s even before he drives off over the horizon,” she muttered.
“I’m sorry?” Earthshine sat on an inflated mattress beside her, with a convincing-looking representation of a silver survival blanket over his shoulders.
Over a small fire—the first she’d built here since she’d left for Mercury, all those years ago—she was making soup, of stock she’d brought with her in her pack, and local potatoes briskly peeled and diced and added for bulk. Plus, she had boiled a pot of Roman tea. She had flashlights and a storm lantern, but in the unending daylight of Per Ardua, enough light leaked through the half-open door flap of the tent for her to see to work.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just rambling. I keep thinking I haven’t slept yet, not since the Hatch.”
“But it’s only been a few hours,” Earthshine said gently. “We’ve seen a lot, learned a lot. It just seems longer.”
“Maybe. Only half a day, but you’re already planning to light out of here, aren’t you?”
He shrugged, and sipped a virtual bowl of tea. “I see no reason to hang around here any longer than it takes the support unit to make itself ready to travel.”