“Exactly.” Seciv nodded, looking pleased. “We could haul ourselves along the Magfield, exactly as we do when we Wave in the Air. Well done, young man.”
Muub pulled at his lower lip. “But maybe the Magfield doesn’t penetrate the underMantle.”
“We believe it does,” Seciv said. “The underMantle and the Sea are permeated by charged particles — protons, electrons and hyperons — which sustain the Magfield.”
Hosch sneered. “What would we do, attach a pair of false legs to the back?”
Farr — whose imagination seemed to have been caught — said excitedly, “No, you’d Wave using coils of superconductor. Like the anchor-bands. You could move them from inside the Bell, and…”
“Good thinking once more,” Seciv said smoothly. “But you could go a little further. It wouldn’t be necessary to move the coils themselves, physically; it is the movement of the current within them that could generate forward motion.”
Muub was nodding slowly. “I see. So you’d make the current flow back and forth.”
“Have it alternate. Exactly. Then the coils could be fixed rigidly to the hull. And, of course, this design would have a certain economy: the craft’s propulsion system would be one and the same as the magnetic shielding system.” He frowned. “But we would still face the problem of the excessive heat in the interior of the craft generated by a nuclear-burning turbine in an enclosed space…”
Hosch looked reluctant to speak, as if, Dura thought, he genuinely hated to contribute anything positive. “But you wouldn’t need to use nuclear burning,” he said at last. “Anything to power the turbine would be sufficient… maybe even human muscles.”
“No, I fear our muscles would be too feeble for such a task. But we could use the power of animals — a team of pigs, harnessed to some form of turbine — yes, indeed!” He laughed and clapped Adda on the back, sending the old man spinning slowly like a bandaged fan. “So it seems after all that we will be riding pigs to the Core!”
Adda steadied himself, grinning widely.
Muub looked around the group. “I don’t believe it.” He sounded disappointed. “I think we’ve come up with something we could build… something that might actually work.”
Seciv pulled at his chin; Dura had never seen hands so bony and delicate. “We should build a prototype — there may still be unforeseen problems with the design. And, of course, once the descent begins the craft will encounter conditions we can only guess at.”
“And then,” Dura said, her spine prickling and cold, “there are the Colonists. In fact, the mission will be a failure if it doesn’t encounter the Colonists. What then?”
“What indeed?” Seciv echoed gravely.
Muub ran a hand over his bald head. “Damn you. Damn all of you. You’ve succeeded too well; I can’t justify reporting to Hork that this idea of his is impossible.” He eyed the Harbor supervisor. “Hosch, I want you to take charge of the design and construction of a prototype.”
Hosch glared back resentfully, his thin face livid.
Muub said icily, “Call on these upfluxers, and you can have some of Seciv’s time. As for labor, use some of your workers from the Harbor. But keep it simple and cheap, will you? There’s no need to waste more of our energy on this than we have to.” He turned in the Air, dismissing them. “Call me when the prototype’s ready.”
The Human Beings, arms loosely linked, followed Muub and the others slowly out of the Stadium.
“So,” Adda said. “A chance to confront gods from the past.”
“Not gods,” Dura said firmly. “Even the Xeelee aren’t gods… But these Colonists could be monsters, if they exist. Remember the Core Wars.”
Adda sniffed. “This damn fool expedition will never get that far anyway. This Waving Bell will be crushed.”
“Perhaps. But you needn’t be so stuffy, Adda. I know you enjoyed playing with ideas, back there. You have to admire the imagination, the spirit of these City folk.”
“Well, what now?” Adda asked. “Do you want to find your friend Ito?”
“Later… I have something to do first. I need to find someone — the daughter of a friend, from my ceiling-farm. A friend called Rauc.”
Adda thought about that. “Does the girl know what’s become of her mother?”
“No,” Dura said quietly. “I’m going to have to tell her.”
Adda nodded, his crumpled face expressionless, seeming to understand.
And one day, Dura thought, I will have to go to the upflux forests, and tell Brow…
She glanced at Farr. The boy’s eyes were fixed on an indefinite distance, and his face was blank. She felt as if she could read his mind. Humans were going to build a ship to find the Colonists. It was indeed an idea full of wonder… deep inside herself, too, she found, there was a small spark of awe.
And Farr was young enough to relish a ride.
But Adda was right. It was an utterly deadly prospect. And surely, she thought, as Hork’s “experts” on the Xeelee, at least one of the three Human Beings would be assigned to the voyage, if it were ever made…
She held Farr’s arm tight and pulled herself closer to him, determined that Farr should never make the journey he was dreaming of.
18
Wakefulness intruded slowly on Mur.
Slowly, in shreds and shards, he became aware of the rustle of the Crust-trees, the tired stink of his own body, the endless yellow glow of the Air pushing into his closed eyecups. He’d used a few loops of frayed rope to bind himself loosely to a branch of an outlying tree, and now he could feel the undeniable reality of the ropes as they dug into the thin flesh of his chest and thighs.
Then the pain started.
His stomach, empty for so long, seemed to be slowly imploding, filling the center of his body with a dull, dragging ache. His joints protested when he began to stir — stiff joints were a wholly unexpected side-effect of hunger, reducing his movements on bad days to those of an old man — and there was a sharp sheet of pain stretched around the inside of his skull, as if his brain were pulling away from the bone.
He jammed his eyes closed and wrapped his arms around himself, feeling his own bony elbows digging into his ribs. How strange it was that he had never slept more deeply in his life than in these impossibly difficult times. While waking life had become steadily more unbearable, sleep was ever more comfortable, seductive, a different realm in which his physical pain and mental distress dissolved.
If only I could stay there, he thought. How easy it would be never to wake up again…
But already the pain had dug too far into his awareness for that option to be available today.
With a sigh he opened his eyes and probed at the cups with one finger, working at rims sharp with crusty sleep deposits. Then he clambered slowly out of his loose sling of ropes. The rest of the Human Beings — the other fourteen — were scattered across the lower rim of the forest, bound by similar loops of rope. Dangling there half-asleep they looked like the pupae of insects, deformed spin-spiders perhaps.
Mur dropped out of the forest, avoiding the eyes of those others who were awake.
He stretched, his muscles still aching from yesterday’s Waving. He pulled a handful of leaf-matter from the tree, and then flexed his legs and Waved stiffly down into the Mantle. Perhaps twenty mansheights below the fringe of the forest ceiling he lifted his tunic and raised his legs to his chest. His hips and knees protested, but he grabbed his lower legs and pulled his thighs close to his stomach. At first his bowels failed to respond to this prompting — like the rest of his system his digestive and elimination processes seemed to be failing, slowly — but he persisted, keeping his arms wrapped around his legs.