At last his lower bowel convulsed, and — with a stab of pain which lanced through the core of his body — a hard packet of waste was expelled into the Air. He glanced down. The waste, floating down into the Mantle, was compact, too dark.
He cleaned himself with his handful of leaves.
Dia, his wife, came drifting down from the impromptu camp in the forest. As she descended, he saw how she was blinking away the remnants of sleep and compressing her eyecups against the brightness of the Air; but she was already — just moments after waking — squinting along the vortex lines into the South, toward the distant Pole, trying to assess how far they had come, how much further was left of this huge odyssey.
When she reached Mur she looked into his face, kissed him on the lips, and wrapped her arms around his chest. He folded his arms around her and rubbed her back. Through her shabby poncho he could feel the bones of her spine. They had nothing to say to each other, so they clung to each other, hanging in the silent Air, with the Quantum Sea spread below them.
Since Dura and the City woman had left in their Air-car — taking away the children, including their own Jai — the fifteen abandoned Human Beings had trekked across the Mantle toward the Pole. The slow pulsations of the vortex lines marked out the endless days of the journey. With no stores of food, the Human Beings were forced to follow the fringe of the Crust-forest; the leaves of the trees were scarcely nutritious, but they did serve to fool the body into forgetting its hunger for a while. Every few days their food ran out and they were forced to interrupt the march. There was some game to be had but the forest was unfamiliar, and the animals, still scared and scattered after the most recent Glitch, were wary and difficult to trap.
Without their own herd, the Human Beings were slowly starving to death. And on this hopeless trek, with its endless days of slow, painful Waving, the Human Beings were probably burning off their energy faster than they could replace it. Mur couldn’t forget the richness of the “bread” Dura had brought to them, when she had come Waving out of the sky so unexpectedly with her startling stories of Cities in the Air.
Their progress around the Mantle’s curve was imperceptible, a crushingly discouraging crawl. Every time he woke to another changeless Mantlescape Mur felt discouraged. And, even when the Pole was neared, the Human Beings would still have to cross the hinterland, the cultivated belt around the Pole. How would the inhabitants of those regions — themselves suffering after the Glitches — welcome this band of starving refugees as they came drifting beneath their ceiling-farms?
The logical thing for the Human Beings to do would be to give up this trek. Their best chance of survival would be to stay here, or even retreat a little further into the upflux, and try to establish a new home on the edge of the Crust-forest. Stop wasting their energies on this trek. They could build a new Net, establish a new herd of Air-pigs. They could even, he’d thought dizzily as he Waved across the silent Air, experiment with maintaining flocks of rays. The flesh of the ray was tough and not as palatable as Air-pig, but it softened when broiled using nuclear-burning heat; and the eggs were fine to eat and easy to store.
…But, of course, that wasn’t possible; for their children had been taken from them, by well-meaning Dura, and transported to the South Pole. When he stared into the dull crimson glow of the Pole, in the far downflux, Mur felt as if a chain as long as a vortex line connected him directly to his child, a chain which dragged inexorably at his heart. Dura’s action had surely been in the best interests of the children. But it left Mur knowing that his only chance of meeting his son again was to stay alive and to complete this trek, all the way to the City at the Pole.
He squeezed Dia once, and then they broke and prepared to return to the Crust-forest, to face the others and begin the day’s work.
“Dia! Mur!” The voice, drifting down from the Crust-forest, radiated excitement.
Dia and Mur slowed their ascent, confused, and looked up. Philas was dropping toward them, her skinny legs pumping at the Air. When she reached the couple, she grabbed at their arms to stop herself.
Dia held Philas’s shoulders. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
Philas, panting, the bones of her face prominent under her tied-back hair, shook her head. “Nothing’s wrong. But… look. Look down there.” She pointed, down past their feet into the Mantle.
The three of them separated and tipped forward in the Air. Mur peered down, trying to follow the direction of Philas’s gesture. He saw the orderly array of vortex lines, the dull purple bruise of the Quantum Sea beyond the crystalline Air. There seemed nothing unusual, except…
There. A small, dark knot in the Air, a hint of motion.
He turned to Dia. “Your eyes are sharper than mine. What is it?”
“People,” she said, squinting down. “A group of them. Twenty or thirty, maybe. It looks like an encampment. But there’s something at the center…”
“What?”
Philas thrust her face forward at Dia. “Do you see it?”
“I think so,” Dia said slowly. Her eyes narrowed. “But it might not mean anything. Philas…”
Mur was baffled. “What is it? What do you see?”
Uncertainty and fear creased Dia’s small, pretty face. “It’s a tetrahedron,” she said.
The fifteen Human Beings gathered on the lower edge of the forest and debated what to do. Dia, fearful, uncertain, thought they shouldn’t waste time on this chance encounter; she wanted simply to continue with the slog to the Pole. Mur sympathized. The Human Beings were already divided, listless, growing steadily more apathetic. It was becoming ever harder to maintain the momentum of this trek across the Mantle; and once that momentum was gone, it might be impossible to regain.
They would be stranded, wherever they stopped. And that, of course, would be unbearable for those with children at the Pole.
Philas and others argued strongly for doing something. “Think about it,” she said vehemently, her thin arms raised over her head as she spoke, her fingers spread wide. “What if that really is a wormhole Interface, left over from the past? What if it’s still working?”
“That’s impossible,” Dia said. “The Interfaces were taken down into the Core, by the Colonists after the Core Wars.”
“The Mantle is a big place,” someone said. “Maybe some of the Interfaces were left functioning. Maybe…”
“Yes,” Philas said eagerly, “just think of that. We know that in the days before the Wars Human Beings could cross the Mantle in huge bounds, using the wormholes. If that is a working Interface down there we might complete this impossible journey in a heartbeat!”
Mur looked around at faces rendered sharp by hunger and exhaustion. Philas was weaving a dream of abandoning this ghastly journey, to reach their goal in moments with the aid of magical ancient technology. It was seductive, compelling, all but irresistible.
Despite his loyalty to Dia, he felt himself falling under the spell of that dream.
“There are already people there,” he said slowly. “Around the Interface. If it is an Interface. Who’s to say how they will react to us? Will they simply let us walk up and wander through?”
“Maybe they’re Colonists,” Philas said.
“Anyway,” said someone, “we won’t know unless we go to find out…”
There was a murmur of agreement. Dia dropped her head.
Philas and Mur were named as scouts, to go ahead to the artifact and investigate, leaving the rest of the Human Beings in the forest until their return.
Mur tried to comfort Dia. “It won’t take us long. And perhaps…”
“Perhaps what?” She stared at him bitterly. “Perhaps there are wizards there who can restore little Jai to us. Is that what you expect?”