She saw all this in the heartbeat it took to cross the space between them and take her brother in her arms. He hugged her back — but not as an uninhibited child, she slowly realized; he put his arms around her and patted her spine, comforting her.

She let him go and held him at arm’s length. His face was square and serious. He seemed to have grown older, and there was more of their father about him.

“I’m well, Dura.”

“Yes. So am I. I thought you might have been injured in the Glitch.”

“I wasn’t in the Bells when the Glitch came. It was my off-shift, and I was in the Harbor…”

“That doesn’t matter,” she said bitterly. “You’re too young to have been sent down in those things.”

“It’s just the way things are,” he said gently. “Boys younger than me have served in the Bells. Dura, none of it is your fault… even if I’d been hurt it wouldn’t have been your fault.”

He was comforting her. He really was growing up.

“Anyway, I haven’t been back to the Harbor for a while,” Farr went on. He smiled. “Not since Adda had Hork send for me. I’ve been staying with Toba.”

“How are the family?”

“Well. Cris has been teaching me to Surf.” Farr held his arms out in the Air, as if balancing on an invisible board. “You’ll have to try it…”

“Dura. You’ve made it; I’m glad.” Adda came paddling through the Air toward them. Dura glanced quickly over the old man; his shoulders, chest and lower legs were still bound up with grubby bandages, but he was moving freely enough. He was towing an object which looked like the skin of an Air-pig; sewn up and inflated, it bobbled behind his clumsy progress like a toy.

She found a clear place on his face — away from the eye-leech — and kissed him. “I’d hug you if I wasn’t scared of breaking you.”

He snorted. “So you got through the Glitch.”

Briefly she told her story; Farr’s eyes grew round when she described the Xeelee ship. She told them how the Human Beings had fared in the Glitch — of their twenty dead. As she recited the familiar, lost names, she was reminded of the simple, moving name-litany ceremonial of the lumberjacks.

She told Adda and Farr of the five upfluxer children lodging, for today, with Deni Maxx. Farr and Adda smiled, and promised to visit the kids.

“Now tell me what we’re doing here. And why you’re towing a dead pig about the place.”

Adda grimaced, making the leech slither across his crumpling cheek. “You’ll find out… damn foolishness, all of it.” He glanced around to the rest of the party; Dura recognized Muub, the Hospital Physician, with two other men. “Come on,” Adda said. “We’d better get on with it.”

With Dura and Farr helping Adda, the three Human Beings made their way to Muub and his companions.

The six of them hovered together close to the center of the huge emptiness of the Stadium; Dura felt cold and isolated despite the clamminess of the Pole. Ropes and guide rails were slung across the huge volume all around them, silent evidence of the crowds this place was designed to accommodate.

The Physician, Muub, was dressed in a severe, dark robe. As before, Dura found it impossible not to stare at the grand dome of his bald head. He greeted them with a smile which seemed professional enough but a little strained. “Thank you for your time.”

Adda grinned. “Oh, we had a choice?”

Muub’s smile thinned. Briskly he introduced his two companions: a Harbor supervisor called Hosch, cadaverously thin, who seemed to know Farr, judging from the sour glances he cast at the boy; and a tall, wispy tree-stem of a man called Seciv Trop whom Muub described as an expert on the Magfield. Like Muub’s, Trop’s fine old head was shaven, in the style of the academics of the University.

Muub rapidly sketched in the background to Hork’s directive. “Frankly, I’m not certain about the value of this program; I may as well tell you that from the start. But I do sympathize with Hork’s thinking.” He looked about him, his expression hard. “I only need to be here, in the fragility of this Stadium, to recognize that we have to find some way to protect ourselves from the random danger of Glitches.”

Dura frowned. “But why are we here? We Human Beings, I mean. You need experts. What can we possibly add?”

“Two things. One is that you are experts — or the nearest we have — on the Xeelee. So Hork believes, at any rate. And second, there’s no one else.” He raised his arms as if to embrace the City. “Dura, Parz may seem a large and rich place to you, but the economy has taken a severe battering from the Glitches. All our resources are devoted to coping with the consequences, to rebuilding the hinterland… all but us, and we are all Hork felt able to spare.” He smiled at them. “Six of us, including a boy. And our mission is to save the world. Perhaps we will succeed; and what plaudits we will earn if we do.”

He fell silent. The six of them hovered in a rough ring, studying each other warily — all but the Magfield expert Seciv Trop, who stared into the distance with his finely chiseled eyecups.

“Well,” Muub said briskly. “Hork asked me to come up with options to achieve the impossible — to penetrate the underMantle, more deeply than any human since prehistory. And I, in turn, asked Hosch and Adda to bring us suggestions to work with. The Bells from the Harbor descend to a depth of about a meter. Our first estimates indicate that we must penetrate at least ten times as deeply — to a depth of ten meters below Parz, deep into the underMantle. Seciv, you’re here to comment, if you will, and to add anything you can.”

Trop nodded briskly. “I’ll do my feeble best,” he said in a thin, mannered voice. Seciv Trop was clearly the oldest of the group. His almost-bare scalp was populated by fine clumps of yellow-gold hair, left carelessly unshaven. And his suit — loosely fitting and equipped with immense pockets — was more battered and patched than Dura had come to expect of the grander City folk.

This old fellow was rather endearing, Dura decided. Farr asked, “Why are we here? In this Stadium?”

“Because of your friend.” Muub eyed the pigskin doubtfully. “Adda tells me he would prefer to demonstrate his idea rather than describe it. I thought I’d better obtain as much space as possible.”

The Harbor supervisor, Hosch, twisted his face into a sneer. “Then maybe we’d better let the old fool get on with it before his damn pig corpse starts stinking out the building.”

Adda grinned and hauled on the short rope which attached the inflated pigskin to his belt. He held the grisly artifact before him, obviously relishing the squeamish reaction of the City men. The skin was revolting, Dura conceded; its orifices had been crudely sewn over and Air pumped in to inflate its boxy bulk, causing its six fins to become erect. Its sketchy, inhuman face seemed to be staring at her. And, she realized, it actually did stink a little.

Hosch sneered. “Is this some kind of joke? The old fool thinks we could all don pigskins and swim to the bloody Core.”

Adda waved the inflated skin in the supervisor’s face. “Wrong, City man. You people travel around in chariots hauled by pigs. At first I wondered if humans could travel in one of those all the way to the Core… but of course the pigs could never survive the journey into the underMantle. So we build a pig… an artificial pig, of wood and Corestuff. Strong enough to withstand the pressures of the underMantle.”

Seciv nodded. “How is this device to be propelled?”

Adda jabbed a finger at the pig’s jet orifice. “With jetfarts, of course. Like the real thing.” He flicked the inflated fins. “And these will keep it stable.” Now he pressed the skin between his arm and his bandaged ribs; Air squirted out of the jet orifice and the pig-corpse wobbled through the air in a ghastly, comic parody of life.