“I don’t know,” Farr said again.
Cris eyed him. “You should be strong enough. And, coming from the upflux, your sense of balance and direction should be well developed. But maybe you’re right. You’re barrel-chested, and your legs are a little short. Even so it mightn’t be impossible for you to stay aboard for a few seconds…”
Farr found himself bridling at this cool assessment. He folded his arms. “Let’s do it,” he said. “Where?”
Cris grinned. “Come on. I’ll show you.”
Ito took Dura to the Museum.
This was situated in the University area of the City — far Upside, as Dura was learning to call it; in fact, not very far below the Palace itself. The University was a series of large chambers interconnected by richly paneled corridors. Ito explained that they weren’t allowed to disturb the academic calm of the chambers themselves, but she was able to point out libraries, seminar areas filled with groups of earnest young people, arrays of small cells within which the scholars worked alone, poring over their incomprehensible studies.
The University was close to the City’s outer wall, and was so full of natural light the Air seemed to glow. There was an atmosphere of calm here, an intensity which made Dura feel out of place (even more than usual). They passed a group of senior University members; these wore flowing robes and had shaved off their hair, and they barely glanced at the two women as they Waved disdainfully past.
She leaned close to Ito and whispered, “Muub. That Administrator at the Hospital. He shaved his head. Does he belong here too?”
Ito smiled. “I’ve never met the man; he sounds a little too grand for the likes of us. But, no, if he works at the Hospital he has no connection now with the University. But he may once have studied here, and he wears the bald fashion as a reminder to the rest of us that once he was a scholar.” Her smile was thin, Dura thought, and tired-looking. “People do that sort of thing, you know.”
“Did you — study — at the University? Or Toba?”
“Me?” Ito laughed, gently. “Do I look as if I could ever have afforded it?… It would be wonderful if Cris could make it here, though. If only we could find the fees — it would give him something higher, something better to aim for. Maybe he wouldn’t waste so much time on that damn Surfboard.”
The Museum was a large cube-shaped structure at the heart of the University complex. It was riddled with passageways and illumination shafts, so that light seeped through the whole of its porous bulk. As they moved slowly through the maze of passageways, the multitude of ports and doorways seemed to conceal a hundred caches of treasure.
One corridor held rows of pigs, rays and Crust-spiders. At first the creatures, looming out of the darkness, made Dura recoil; but she soon realized that these animals were no threat to her — and never would be to anyone else. They were dead, preserved somehow, fixed to the walls of this place in grim parodies of their living postures: gazing at the magnificent, outstretched wings of a ray, pinned against a frame of wood, Dura felt unaccountably sad. A little further along a display showed an Air-pig — dead like the others, but cut open and splayed out with its organs — small masses of tissue fixed to the inner wall of the body — now glistening, exposed for her inspection. Dura shuddered. She had killed dozens of Air-pigs, but she could never have brought herself to touch this cold, clean display.
Oddly, there was no smell in these corridors, either of life or death.
They came to an area containing human artifacts. Much of it was from the City itself, Dura gathered, but from ages past; Ito laughed as she pointed to clothes and hats mounted on the walls. Dura smiled politely, not really seeing the joke. There was a model of the City, finely carved of wood and about a mansheight tall. There was even a lamp inside so that the model was filled with light. Dura spent some time peering at this in delight, with Ito pointing out the features of the City. Here was a toy lumber train entering one of the great ports Downside, and here was the Spine leading down into the underMantle; tiny cars carrying model Fishermen descended along the Spine, seeking lodes of precious Corestuff. And the Palace at the very crown of the City — at the farthest Upside of all — was a rich tapestry glowing with life and color.
Further along, there were small cases containing artifacts from outside the City. Ito touched her arm. “Perhaps you’ll recognize some of this.” There were spears and knives, all carved from wood; she saw nets, ponchos, lengths of rope.
Upfluxer artifacts.
None of them looked as if they had come from the Human Beings themselves. But, said Ito, that wasn’t so surprising; there were upfluxer bands all around the fringe of Parz’s hinterland, right around the Star’s Polar cap. Dura studied the objects, aware of her own knife, her rope still wrapped around her waist. The things she carried wouldn’t be out of place inside one of these displays, she realized. With a tinge of bitterness, she wondered if these people would like to pin her and her brother up on the walls, like that poor, dead ray.
Finally, Ito brought her to the Museum’s most famous exhibit (she said). They entered a spherical room perhaps a dozen mansheights across. The light here was dim, coming only from a few masked wood-lamps, and it took some time for Dura’s eyes to adapt to the darkness.
At first she thought there was nothing here, that the chamber was empty. Then, slowly, as if emerging from mist, an object took shape before her. It was a cloud about a mansheight across, a mesh of some shining substance. Ito encouraged her to move a little closer, to push her face closer to the surface of the mesh. The exhibit was like a tangled-up net, composed of cells perhaps a handsbreadth across. And Dura saw that within the cells of the main mesh there was more detail: sub-meshes, composed of fine cells no wider than a hair-tube. Perhaps, Dura wondered, if she could see well enough she would find still more cells, almost invisibly tiny, within the hair-scale mesh.
Ito showed Dura a plaque on the wall, inscribed with text on the display. “ ‘The structure is fractal.’ ” Ito pronounced the word carefully. “ ‘That is, it shows a similar structure on many scales. Corestuff lends itself to this property, being composed of hyperons, bags of quarks in which are dissolved the orderly nucleons — the protons and neutrons — of the human world.
“ ‘In regions humans can inhabit Corestuff exists in large metastable islands of matter — the familiar Corestuff bergs retrieved by Fishermen, and used to construct anchor-bands, among other artifacts…
“ ‘But further in, in the deep Core, the hyperonic material can combine to form extraordinary, rich structures like this model. The representation here is based on guesswork — on fragmentary tales from the time of the Core Wars, and on half-coherent accounts of Fishermen. Nevertheless, the University scholars feel that…’ ”
“But,” Dura interrupted, “what is it?”
Ito turned to her, her face round and smooth in the dim light. “Why, it’s a Colonist,” she said.
“But the Colonists were human.”
“No,” Ito said. “Not really. They abandoned us, stealing our machines, and went down into the Core.” She looked somber. “And this is what they became. They lived in these structures of Corestuff.”
Dura stared into the deep, menacing depths of the model. It was as if, here in the belly of the City, she had been transported to the Core itself and left to face this bizarre, monstrous entity alone.