But the Games were going to be different, it seemed. As the Day approached he sensed a quickening of the City’s pulse. There seemed to be more people on the streets, arguing and gambling over the outcome of the various strangely named events. The Luge. The Slalom. The Pole-Divers… The Games would be like a holiday for the City, a relief from drudgery.
Adda was curious.
So, in the end, he decided to accept Muub’s invitation.
The Stadium was a huge, clearwood-walled box fixed to one of the City’s upper edges. The Committee Box was a balcony which hung over the Stadium itself from the City’s upper surface, and to reach it Adda had to travel to the uppermost Upside, to the Garden surrounding the Palace itself. Feeling more out of place than ever in the opulent surroundings, he Waved past the miniature, sculpted Crust-trees, brandishing his begrimed bandaging like a weapon. He was subjected to scrutiny by three layers of contemptuous Guards before he reached the Box itself; he enjoyed insulting them as they searched his person.
At last he was ushered into the Box, a square platform twenty mansheights on a side domed over by clearwood. Neat rows of cocoons filled the platform, bound loosely to the structure by soft threads. About half the cocoons were already full, Adda saw; courtiers and other grandees nestled in the soft leather of the cocoons like huge, glittering insect larvae. Their talk was bright and loud, their laughter braying; there was a heavy, cloying scent of perfume.
Adda was escorted to the front row of the Box by a small, humble-looking woman in a drab tunic. Muub was already there. He rested in his cocoon with his long, thin arms folded calmly against his chest, and his bare scalp shone softly as he surveyed the Stadium below. He turned to greet Adda with a nod. With ill grace Adda let the woman servant help him into a spare cocoon; his legs remained stiff and his right shoulder barely mobile, so that, embarrassingly, he had to be levered into the cocoon as if he were a statue of wood. Another woman, smiling, approached him with a box of sweetmeats; Adda chased her away with a snarl.
Muub smiled at him indulgently. “I’m glad you decided to come, Adda. I believe you will find the Day interesting.”
Adda nodded, trying to be gracious. After all, he had accepted Muub’s invitation. But what was it about this man’s manner that irritated him so? He nodded over his shoulder at the sparkling ranks of courtiers. “That lot seems to agree with you.”
Muub regarded the courtiers with aloof disdain. “Games Day is a spectacle which does not fail to excite the unsophisticated,” he said softly. “No matter how many times it is viewed. And besides, Hork is absent. As you know very well. And there is something of a vacuum of authority, among my more shallow colleagues, until the Chair’s return.” He listened to the jabber of the courtiers for a moment, his large, fragile head cocked to one side. “You can hear it in their tone. They are like children in the absence of a parent.” He sighed.
Adda grinned. “Well,” he said, “it’s nice to know that your superciliousness isn’t restricted to upfluxers.” He deliberately ignored Muub’s reaction; he leaned forward in his cocoon and stared through the clearwood wall below him.
He was perched at the upper rim of the City. Its wooden Skin swept away below him, huge, uneven, battered; the great Corestuff anchor-bands were arcs of silver-gray cutting across the sky. Far below the City the Pole was a mass of bruised purple. Vortex lines shimmered across the sky around the City, on their way to their own rotation pole around the curve of the Star…
Adda stared at the vortex lines for a moment. Were they more tightly packed than usual? He tried to detect a drift through the Air, a presage of another Glitch. But he wasn’t in the open Air — he wasn’t able to smell the changes in the photons, to taste the Air’s disturbance — and he couldn’t be sure there was any change.
The Stadium was thronged with people who swarmed through the Air, hauling themselves over each other and along the ropes and rails strung across the great volume. Even through layers of clearwood, Adda could hear the excited buzz of the crowd; the sound seemed to come in waves of intensity, sparkling with fragments of individual voices — the cry of a baby, the hawking yells of vendors working the crowd. Sewage outlets sprayed streams of clear waste from the shell of the Stadium into the patient Air.
Away from the bulk of the City, acrobats Waved silkily through the Air in a prelude to the Games proper. They were young, lithe, nude, their skins dyed with strong primary colors; with ripples of their legs and arms they spiraled around the vortex lines and dived at each other, grabbing each others’ hands and whirling away on new paths. There must have been a hundred of them, Adda estimated; their dance, chaotic yet obviously carefully choreographed, was like an explosion of young flesh in the Air.
He became aware that Muub was watching him; there was curiosity in the Physician’s shallow eyecups. Adda let his jaw hang open, playing the goggling tourist. “My word,” he said. “What a lot of people.”
Muub threw his head back and laughed. “All right, Adda. Perhaps I deserved that. But you can scarcely blame me for my fascination at your reaction to all this. Such scenes can scarcely have been imaginable to you, in your former life in the upflux.”
Adda gazed around, trying to take in the whole scene as a gestalt — the immense, human construct of the City itself, a thousand people gathered below for a single purpose, the scarcely believable opulence of the courtiers in the Box with their fine clothes and sweetmeats and servants, the acrobats flourishing their limbs through the Air in their huge dance. “Yes, it’s impressive,” he said. He tried to find ways of expressing what he was feeling. “More than impressive. Uplifting, in a way. When humans work together, we can challenge the Star itself. I suppose it’s good to know that not everyone has to scratch a living out of the Air, barely subsisting as the Human Beings do. And yet…”
And yet, why should there be wealth and poverty? The City was a marvelous construct, but it was dwarfed on the scale of the Star — and it was no bigger than an Ur-human’s thumb, probably. But even within its tiny walls there were endless, rigid layers: the courtiers in their Box, walled off from the masses below; the Upside and Downside; and the invisible — yet very real — barriers between the two. Why should it be so? It was as if humans built such places as this with the sole purpose of finding ways to dominate each other.
Muub listened to Adda’s clumsy expression of this. “But it’s inevitable,” he said, his face neutral. “You have to have organization — hierarchy — if you are to run the complex, interlinking systems which sustain a society like the City with its hinterland. And only within such a society can man afford art, science, wisdom — even leisure of the most brutish sort, like these Games. And with hierarchies comes power.” He smiled at Adda, condescending once more. “People aren’t very noble, upfluxer. Look around you. Their darker side will find expression in any situation where they can best each other.”
Adda remembered times in the upflux, when he was young, and the world was less treacherous than it had become of late. He recalled hunting-parties of five or six men and women, utterly immersed in the silence of the Air, their senses open, thrilling to the environment around them. Completely aware and alive, as they worked together.
Muub was an observer, he realized. Believing he was above the rest of mankind, but in fact merely detached. Cold. The only way to live was to be yourself, in the world and in the company of others. The City was like a huge machine designed to stop its citizens doing just that — to alienate. No wonder the young people clambered out of the cargo ports and lived on the Skin, riding on the Air by wit and skill. Seeking life.