7 Harmony Heaven
Chris hired a Titanide to take him to something called the Place of Winds, where he was told he could get an elevator ride to the hub. The Titanide was a blue-and-white long-haired pinto female named Castanet (Sharped Lydian Duet) Blues, but it was Chris who had the blues. The Titanide spoke some English and attempted to engage him in conversation, to which Chris replied in grunts, so she passed the trip playing her brass horn while at a full gallop.
He began to take more interest in the trip as they left Titantown behind. The ride was as smooth as a Hovercraft. They passed through brown hills and rode for a time beside a swift-flowing tributary of the river Ophion. Then the land began to rise toward the imposing presence of the Place of Winds.
Gaea was a circular suspension bridge. Her hub served as the anchor against centripetal force. Radiating down her spokes were ninety-six cables that tied the hub to the subterranean bone plates of the rim. Each cable was five kilometers in diameter, composed of hundreds of wound strands. They contained conduits for heating and cooling fluxes, and arteries for the transport of nutrients. Some of the cables met the ground at right angles, but the majority emerged from the vast spoke mouths overhead to slant through a twilight zone for a time before fastening in a daylight area.
The Place of Winds was the Hyperion terminus of a slanting cable. It looked like a long arm reaching out of darkness, its fingers gripping the land in a fist of rubble. Somewhere in the maze of ridges and tumbled boulders high winds sang as air was pumped upward to spill in the hub and fall through the spokes. It was Gaea's millennial air conditioner, the means by which she prevented the formation of a pressure gradient and maintained a breathable oxygen pressure in a column of air 600 kilometers high. It was also the angels' stairway to heaven. But Castanet and Chris were not headed there; the elevator was on the other side.
It took Castanet nearly an hour-or one rev, Chris reminded himself-to go around the cable. The far side was daunting. Incalculable tonnes of cable rested on the air above them, as if a skyscraper had been erected parallel to the ground.
The land beneath the cable was uncharacteristically barren. It could not have been merely lack of sunlight; Gaea was known for her prolificacy, supporting life forms adapted to any environmental extreme, including perpetual darkness. But only in the vicinity of the elevator terminus itself was there any plant life.
It was a dark, soft capsule, four meters long and three high, with a dilated opening in one end. The other was pressed against a sphincter of a kind common in Gaea. These openings led to the circulatory system, which, if one dared, could be used as transport. The capsules were corpuscles that included-in the dual-function organization that was a Gaean trademark-a life-support system. An oxygen-breathing animal placed inside could survive until it died of starvation.
Chris climbed in and seated himself on the free-form couchshape inside. There were filaments growing from the inner walls, useful in strapping oneself securely. Chris used them. It was his third ride in what native Gaeans called the bumper cars. He knew the ride could be rough as the thing bumbled through eddied currents around switch points.
The interior was luminescent. With the opening sealed behind him, Chris wished he had brought a book. He faced a three-hour ride with no company but his churning stomach and the knowledge that at the end of the line he would be interviewed by a God.
There was a sucking sound as the capsule was drawn into the protective maze of valves within the cable. It blundered from auricle to ventricle until, with an unexpected surge of power, it headed for heaven.
The dancer was under a suspended spotlight, floating in and out of a yellow cone spilling through the still air. He was a tap-dancing fool in top hat and tails, spats and boiled shirt. Like all the best dancers, he made it look easy. The soles of his black shoes and the metal foot of his cane hammered a complex tattoo that echoed in the unseen cavern of the hub.
He was performing fifty meters from the door of the common, ordinary elevator which had brought Chris on the last leg of the trip. A bell rang, and Chris turned to see the door closing.
The dancer disturbed him. It was as if he had walked into a theater showing an obscure film that was half over. The man must refer to something; the artist must have had something in mind. But there he danced, divorced from all meaning, sufficient unto himself. His face was concealed in the shadow cast by the brim of his hat; only his pale pointed chin was visible. He should remove his hat, Chris thought, to reveal an empty skulclass="underline" the face of death. Or else stop dancing and indicate with his elegantly gloved hand where Chris's path lay. He gave no such signal, refused to turn himself into a symbol of anything. He just kept dancing.
He finally made his move when Chris approached him. The spotlight winked out, and another came on twenty meters distant. The man's silhouette clattered through darkness until it was again fleshed out in light. A third light came on, a fourth, a diminishing series. He leaped from one to the other, pausing for an improvised rhythmic statement before hoofing it to the next one. Then the lights died. The sound of taps on marble was gone.
The darkness of the hub was not absolute. High above was a single, dimensionless red line of light, sharp as a laser. Chris stood between high shadows: Gaea's cathedral collection. Spires and towers, flying buttresses and stone gargoyles were cool gray against fathomless black. Did they have interiors? His books had not said. He knew only that Gaea collected architecture and specialized in places of worship.
The regular tapping of heels in the distance soon resolved itself into a human woman in a white jumpsuit, like the ones the quarantine personnel had worn. She came around the corner of a squat stone temple, paused to sweep the area with a flashlight. The glare blinded him, moved past, returned to pin him like an escaping felon, then lowered.
"This way, please," she said.
Chris joined her, feeling awkward in the low gravity. She led him on an irregular path through the monuments. Her boots were white leather, with stilted heels that clacked authoritatively. She made it look easy, while Chris tended to bounce like a rubber ball. The spin of the hub imparted only one-fortieth gee; he weighed just a few kilograms.
He wondered what she was. It had not occurred to him, in quarantine, to doubt the humanity of the employees. Up here, it was somehow different. He knew Gaea could, and often did, make living creatures to order. She could create new species, such as the Titanides, who were only two centuries old as a race, and give them free will and the benefit of her neglect. Or she could make one-shot individuals just as free and uncontrolled.
But she also made things called tools of Gaea. These creatures were nothing more than extensions of herself. She used them to build full-scale replicas of cathedrals, to communicate with small life forms-to do anything she could not accomplish through her normal ecology of existence. He would soon meet one of these tools, who would call herself Gaea. Gaea was actually all around him, yet it would do him little good to speak to the walls.
Chris looked again at the tall woman with the flowing black hair. Was she a tool or a real human?
"Where are you from?" he asked.
"Tennessee."
The buildings were built to no plan. Some shouldered close in what Chris thought of as celestial slum districts; others were widely separated. The haphazard arrangement was as likely to form a plaza as an alley. They squeezed between a replica of Chartres and a nameless pagoda, crossed a huge square paved in marble on the way to Karnak.
The writer of the book Chris had read confessed bafflement as to why Gaea built these things. And why, having done so, did she leave them in the dark, all but invisible? It made one feel like a flea lost in the musty bottom of a child's toy box. The structures might have been counters in a trillionaire's Monopoly set.