“Riveting,” Adda said drily.

Muub bit back a sharp comment. “Well, I know you people have different priorities in life. Let’s view the rest of the Garden… perhaps some of it will remind you of the world you have left behind. I’m curious as to how you lived, actually.”

“We upfluxers?” Adda asked acidly.

Muub replied smoothly, “You Human Beings. For example, superfluidity… Have you retained much knowledge of such matters?”

Adda said, “Much of the lore absorbed by our children is practical and everyday… how to repair a net; how to keep yourself clean; how to turn the battered corpse of an Air-pig into a meal, a garment, a source of weapons, a length of rope.”

Muub felt himself shudder delicately.

“But knowledge is our common heritage, City man,” Adda murmured. “We would scarcely allow you to rob us of that, as you robbed us of our place here ten generations ago.”

Turning, Muub led Adda slowly away from the Fount. Beside the youthful grace of the acrobats, Adda’s ungainly stiffness was laughable — and yet heartbreaking, Muub thought. They passed through one of Hork’s experimental ceiling-farm areas. Here a new strain of wheat — tall and fat-stemmed — thrust from a simulated section of Crust-forest root-ceiling.

“Tell me, Adda. What are your plans now?”

“Why should you care?”

“I’m curious.”

Adda was silent for a while; then, grudgingly, he replied: “I’m going to go back. Back to the upflux. What else?”

“And how do you propose to achieve that?”

“I’ll damn well Wave there if I have to,” Adda growled. “If I can’t get one of your citizens to take me home in one of those pig-drawn cars you have.”

Muub was tempted to mock. He tried to summon up sympathy, to put himself in Adda’s situation — alone and far from home in a place he must find frighteningly strange, despite his bravado. “My friend,” he said evenly, “with all respect to the skills of my staff in the Common Good, and to the remarkable progress you are making… I have to say it will be a long time before you are fit for such a journey. Even by car, the trek would kill you.”

Adda snarled. “I’ll take my chances.”

“And if you made it home you’d never be as strong as you were, frankly. Your pneumatic system has been weakened to well below its nominal level.”

Adda’s response, when it came, seemed doubtful. “I couldn’t hunt?”

“No.” Muub shook his head firmly. “Even if you were able to Wave fast enough to creep up on, let us say, an aged and unfit Air-pig…” — that won a slight smile from the upfluxer — “even so, you could never survive the low pressures, the thin Air of the upperMantle. You see, you would be a burden on your people if you returned. I’m sorry.”

Adda’s anger was apparently directed inward now. “I will not be a burden. I wanted to die, after my injury. You did not allow me to die.”

“It was the choice of your companions. They did not allow you to die; they sold their labor to pay for your continued health. Adda, you owe it to them to maximize the usefulness of your new life.”

Adda shook his head stiffly, the bandaging rustling at his neck. “I cannot return home. But I have nothing here.”

“Perhaps you could find work. Anything you could earn would reduce the burden on your friends.” …And help besides, Muub forbore to add, to pay for Adda’s own food and shelter once his medical treatment was concluded.

“What could I do? Do you hunt here? I can’t see myself being much use stalking blades of mutated grass.”

They had come now to a simulation of the wild Crust-forest. Dwarf Crust-trees — slender whips no taller than a mansheight — thrust out of the roof of Parz. A clutch of young ray, shackled to the roof surface by short lengths of rope, snapped at them as they passed. Muub glanced at Adda, curious about the old man’s reaction to this toy forest. But Adda had turned his face up to the vortex lines swooping over the City; his good eye was half-closed, as if he were peering at something, and the leech crawled, ignored, over his face.

Muub hesitated. “When I first encountered you, you were swaddled in makeshift bandages. And you had splints… Do you remember? The splints seemed actually to be spears, of varying lengths and thicknesses. All decorated with fine engravings.”

“What of it? Are you suggesting I could get a price for them here? I thought your people, your Guards, were well enough equipped with their bows and whips.”

“Indeed. No, we do not need your weapons… as weapons. But as artifacts the spears have a certain — novelty.” Muub sought the right words. “A kind of primitive artistry that is really rather appealing. Adda, I suspect you could get a decent price for your artifacts, especially from collectors of primitive materiel. And if, by chance, you were capable of producing more…”

There was an odd change in the quality of light around them. Muub glanced around, half-expecting to find that they had fallen into the shadow of an Air-car; but the sky was empty, save for the vortex lines. Still the feeling of change persisted, though, unsettling Muub; he pulled his robe closer around him.

Adda laughed. “I’d rather die than whore myself.”

Muub opened his mouth, shaping a reply. That may be the choice, old man… But now there was some sort of disturbance among the courtiers around them. No longer drifting in their intense little knots of intrigue, the courtiers were gathering together as if for comfort, pointing at the sky. “I wonder what’s wrong. They seem scared.”

“Look up,” Adda said drily. “Perhaps that has something to do with it.”

Muub looked into the old man’s sour, battered face, and then lifted his head to the open Air.

The flux lines were moving. They were surging upward, away from the City, rising like huge knife-blades toward the Crust.

“Glitch, “Adda said, his voice tight. “Another one. And a bad one. Muub, you must do what you can to protect your people.”

“Is the City in danger?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps not. But those in the ceiling-farms certainly are…”

Muub, in the last moment before rushing to his duties, found time to remember that Adda’s own people too were exposed to all of this, lost somewhere in the sky.

The Air above him seemed to shimmer; somewhere a courtier screamed.

It was Rauc who first noticed the change in the sky.

Dura and Rauc were working together in a corner of Qos Frenk’s ceiling-farm. Dura was wearing the mandatory Air-tank, but she wore the veil pushed back from her face; and the heavy wooden tank thumped against her back as she worked. She had pushed her head and shoulders high into the stems of wheat, so that she was surrounded by a bottomless cage of the yellow-gold plants. She reached above her head with both hands, burrowing with her fingers among the roots of the wheat. Stems scratched her bare arms. Here was another sapling; it felt warm and soft, undeniably a living thing, a thin thread of heavy-nuclei material pulsing along its axis. Young Crust-trees were the most persistent danger to Frenk’s crop, springing up endlessly despite continual weeding. The saplings — thinner than a finger’s width — were difficult to see, but easy to pick out from among the wheat-stems by touch. She allowed her fingers to track along the sapling’s length further up into the shadows of the wheat. She probed at its roots, which snaked up into the tangle of roots and plants which comprised the forest ceiling, and patiently prized them out.

It was dull, mindless work, but not without a certain satisfaction: she enjoyed the feel of the plants in her fingers, and relished deploying the simple skills she was learning. Maybe in some other life she might have been a good farmer, she thought. She liked the orderliness of the farm — although not the pressure of other people — and the work was simple enough to leave her mind free to wander, to think of Farr, of the upflux, and…