“Yes, sir.”

The navigator took our map and my video tape, and we left the Navigation chambers.

Outside, I said to Clausewitz: “Sir, I’d like to volunteer for one of the new surveys.”

He shook his head. “No. You get three days’ leave, and then you go back to the Track guild.”

“But—”

“Guild rules.”

Clausewitz turned away, and he and Denton walked towards the Futures’ room. Technically that area was mine too, but suddenly I felt excluded. Quite literally, I had nowhere to go. While I had been working outside the city I had been sleeping in one of the Militia dormitories; now, officially on leave, I wasn’t even sure where I lived. There were bunks in the Futures’ room, and I could sleep there for the moment, but I knew that I should see Victoria as soon as possible. I had been putting this off; being away from the city conveniently prevented it. I was still wondering how I could deal with the new situation with her, and the answer to that lay in meeting her. I changed my clothes, and had a shower.

6

Nothing much had changed inside the city while I’d been north, and the domestic and medical administrators were wholly preoccupied with looking after the wounded and reorganizing the sleeping accommodation. There was less sense of desperation in the faces of the people I saw, and some efforts had been made to keep the corridors clear, but even so I realized that this was probably a bad moment to try to settle a domestic issue.

Victoria was difficult to trace. After enquiring of several of the domestic administrators I was sent to a makeshift dormitory on the lowest level, but she was not there. I spoke to the woman in charge.

“You’re her ex-husband, aren’t you?”

“That’s right. Where is she?”

“She doesn’t want to see you. She’s very busy. She’ll contact you later.”

“I want to see her,” I said.

“You can’t. Now, if you’ll excuse me we’re very busy.”

She turned her back on me and continued her work. I glanced around the crowded dormitory: off-shift workers slept at one end, and there were several wounded lying in rough beds at the other. Although there were a few people moving between the beds, Victoria was not among them.

I walked back up to the Futures’ room. During the time I had been looking for Victoria I had made a decision. There was no point in my hanging around the city aimlessly; I might as well go back to work on the tracks. But first, I had decided to read Clausewitz’s copy of Destaine’s Directive.

The Futures’ room was empty but for one guildsman. He introduced himself to me as Future Blayne.

“You’re Mann’s son, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Glad to see you. Have you been up future yet?”

“Yes,” I said. I liked the look of Blayne. He was not much older than myself, and he had a fresh, open face. He seemed glad to have someone to talk to; he was, he said, due to go north on one of the surveys later in the day, and would be on his own for the next few miles.

“Do we normally go north alone?” I said.

“Normally, yes. We can work in pairs if Clausewitz gives his approval, but most Futures prefer to work alone. I like company myself, find it a bit lonely up there. How about you?”

“I’ve only been up future once. That was with Future Denton.”

“How did you get on with him?”

And so we talked, amiably and without the usual guards that seemed to show up whenever I had talked to other guildsmen. I had unconsciously adopted this manner myself, and at first I suppose I might have seemed diffident in his company. Within a few minutes, though, I found his forthright manner relaxing, and soon I felt as if we were old friends.

I told him I had made a video recording of the sun.

“Did you wipe it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Erase it from the tape.”

“No… should I have?”

He laughed. “You’ll have the Navigators down on you if they see it. You’re not supposed to use the tapes for anything except cross-referenced images of the terrain.”

“Will they see it?”

“They might. If they’re satisfied with the map, they’ll probably check a few cross-references. They’re not likely to go through the whole tape. But if they do…”

“What’s wrong with it?” I said.

“Guild rules. Tape is valuable, and shouldn’t be wasted. But don’t worry about it. Why did you record the sun, anyway?”

“An idea I had. I wanted to try and analyse it. It’s such an interesting shape.”

He looked at me with new interest.

“What do you make of it?” he said.

“Inverse values.”

“That’s right. How did you work it out? Did someone tell you?”

“I remembered something from the crèche. A hyperbola.”

“Have you thought it through yet? There’s more to it than that. Have you thought about the surface area?”

“Future Denton was explaining. He said it was very large.”

Blayne said: “Not very large… infinitely large. North of the city the surface curves up until it is almost, but never quite, vertical. South of the city it becomes almost but not quite horizontal. The world is spinning on its axis, and so with an infinite radius it is spinning at infinite speed.”

He delivered this flatly and without expression.

“You’re joking,” I said.

“No I’m not. I’m perfectly serious. Where we are, near optimum, the effects of the spin are the same as they would be on Earth planet. Further south, although the angular velocity is identical, the speed increases. When you were down past, did you feel the centrifugal force?”

“Yes.”

“If you’d gone any further, you wouldn’t be here now to remember it. That force is bloody real.”

“I was told,” I said, “that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light.”

“That’s true. Nothing does. In theory the world’s circumference is infinitely long and moves at infinite speed. But there is, or there is considered to be, a point where matter ceases to exist, and serves as an effective circumference. That point is where the spinning of the world imparts a velocity on the matter equivalent to the speed of light.”

“So it’s not infinite.”

“Not quite. But bloody big. Look at the sun.”

“I have,” I said. “Often.”

“That’s the same. If it wasn’t spinning it would be, literally, infinitely large.”

I said: “Even so, in theory it is that large. How can there be room for more than one object of infinite size?”

“There’s an answer to that. You won’t like it.”

“Try me.”

“Go to the library, and find one of the astronomical books. It doesn’t matter which. They’re all Earth planet books, so they all have the same assumptions. If we were now on Earth planet we would be living in a universe of infinite size, which would be occupied by a number of large, but finite, bodies. Here the inverse is the rule: we live in a large but finite universe, occupied by a number of bodies of infinite size.”

“It doesn’t make sense.”

“I know,” said Blayne. “I said you wouldn’t like it.”

“Where are we?”

“No one knows.”

“Where is Earth planet?”

“No one knows that either.”

I said: “Down past something strange happened. I was with three girls. As we went south, their bodies changed. They—”

“Did you see anyone up future?”

“No, we… we kept away from the villages.”

“North of optimum the local people change physically. They become very tall and thin. The further north we travel, the more the physical factors change.”

“I’ve only been about fifteen miles north.”

“Then you probably wouldn’t have noticed anything peculiar. Further than thirty-five miles north of optimum, it’s very strange.”

Later, I said: “Why does the ground move?”

“I’m not sure,” said Blayne.

“Is anyone?”

“No.”

“Where is it moving to?”

“More to the point,” said Blayne, “where is it moving from?”