“I am what I am,” Ty said.

“And what is that?” Ariane asked.

“A bartender. Always happy to make new acquaintances.” He nodded at Bard. “Or to provide guests with drinks. Anyone thirsty?”

No one admitted to being thirsty.

“For beverages, I meant,” Ty added. “I’m sure we are all thirsty for knowledge.”

Doc liked that. “Knowledge in general, Tyuratam?”

“Oh, I’d be living on Stromness if I were a knowledge-in-general man,” Ty said. “A collector of facts. No, I take a more utilitarian stance.”

“Meaning that you would like to know why we are here,” Doc said.

Ty seemed to find the question overly blunt, and raised the ridge of scar tissue that had once been a honey-colored eyebrow. “If you’d enjoy saying something about it, I’d enjoy listening,” he admitted. “If not, well, I’m willing to come along for the ride—up to a point.”

Doc now looked across the table toward Ariane, in a way that made tumblers click inside of Kath Two’s head. He was handing control of the meeting to Ariane. It might be going too far to say that she was in charge, but she was probably in communication with whoever was.

“Most of our operations will be on the surface,” she said. “You might have inferred as much from the fact that we have gone out of our way to involve Indigens”—she glanced at Ty and Bard—“and Survey personnel.” She nodded at Kath Two and at Beled. The last gesture elicited another one of those sardonic snorts from Ty—pointing out, apparently, just how implausible it was that a man fitting the profile of Lieutenant Tomov could possibly be taken seriously as a member of Survey. Ariane gave Ty a cool look, as if to say Don’t start, then continued: “And I need hardly belabor the longstanding connection with the surface embodied by Doc and Memmie.”

Conspicuously absent from the list, now, was Ariane herself, but if she was aware of the omission, she didn’t show it. Everyone was left to make what guesses and assumptions they might about how her career—whatever it might be—was connected with the surface.

“Discretion is important,” Ariane continued, “which is why we will tend to operate out of Cradle and use atmospheric or surface transportation.” Meaning airplanes and things that crawled on the surface of New Earth as opposed to rocket ships, bolos, and Aitken-Kucharski devices like giant whips. “Whenever possible, we will enter and exit Cradle on foot—via the subterranean passages that are afforded by sockets.”

“When’s the next—” Kath Two started to ask.

“Cayambe,” Ariane said. “Two days from now.”

“We are going to travel from Cayambe to Beringia on the surface?” Kath Two asked.

Ty and Bard both looked at her curiously.

“I haven’t said anything about Beringia,” Ariane pointed out.

“But it’s obviously where we’re going,” Kath Two said. “It’s where Beled and I—and a lot of other people—were sent on Survey. It’s where I saw what I saw, and told Beled about it. This whole thing was precipitated by that, wasn’t it?”

“It has been brewing for longer. Years,” Ariane said. “But you’re not wrong.”

“Ty’s from that part of the world—I can tell by his accent. Bard is from south of there, on Antimer,” Kath Two went on.

“We will head north from the Cayambe Socket, yes,” Ariane said.

“North a hell of a long way,” Ty pointed out.

“We are not prevented from using air transport,” Ariane reminded him.

“If we can get a big enough glider,” Kath Two put in, “the mountain wave will take us right up the Andes, the Sierras, and the Cascades in a day or two.”

“I am fairly confident,” Ariane said, “that we can get a big enough glider.”

THE UNDERSURFACE OF CRADLE, ONLY VISIBLE TO PEOPLE STANDING on the ground—more specifically, on the equator—looking up at it, was flat and generally egg-shaped, elongated in the direction of its east-west movement. On closer inspection its mostly smooth surface was interrupted from place to place by small hatches, carefully engineered protrusions, orifices, and other details. These were distributed around that otherwise featureless surface in a way that suggested orderly minds at work, addressing complications posed by the asymmetries of the city above.

In several places along the equator of New Earth, ground had been cleared and flattened, and reinforced concrete pads laid. These had the same size and shape as Cradle’s undersurface, and were equipped with their own hatches and orifices matching those on Cradle. Cradle could be neatly set down into one of these sockets whenever the Eye happened to be directly overhead. There it might reside for hours or days, taking on or discharging supplies, and otherwise communing with the surroundings. But it never stayed for long, since it had to follow the movements of the Eye, which always had urgent business elsewhere on the ring.

At such times, a traveler who knew nothing of orbiting tethers and the like, emerging from the woods or cresting some nearby hill, and coming into view of Cradle, would perceive it as a normal, which was to say stationary, city. The bucket handle arching high over its top was a heavy hint that something was a bit odd about it. Other than that, however, it would look, in that context, like a somewhat isolated hill fort.

Some of the more well-established sockets had begun to accumulate suburbs: ring-shaped towns that would come to life whenever Cradle was in residence. Most of them had the feel, and shared the purposes, of military bases, scientific installations, and frontier outposts. It had always been envisioned that many such would be built in time, creating a ring around the equator to match the habitat ring far above it, and that once New Earth was opened for general settlement they would grow into important cities. To visit one now, centuries before its glorious peak, was something of an acquired taste—a little like walking around a building site after foundations have been laid and a few walls framed. Builders, dreamers, and people of imagination enjoyed such places; others saw nothing.

Cayambe and Kenya had been the first two sockets, built in the most likely sites on South America and Africa respectively. Each numbered around ten thousand souls.

Cayambe’s namesake was a volcano at the intersection of the Andes and the equator, in what had once been the country of Ecuador. It had, of course, taken a beating during the Hard Rain, and resumed erupting for a while, but had now been dormant for about seven hundred years. In any case the Cayambe Socket had been built well clear of its most active vents, placing the volcano’s summit, which was once again snow covered, far enough away that it could be admired from any windows on Cradle that happened to be aimed in the right direction.

The Crow’s Nest’s tower afforded views in almost all directions, and so Tyuratam Lake, standing behind his bar two days later, polishing a glass with a towel, was able to look up between two tap handles and see the summit glide into view and then seemingly rise upward from the horizon as Cradle was lowered gingerly into its socket. Klaxons sounded all over Cradle and across the earthbound ring city that was now coming into view beyond its windscreens. Out of habit Ty stuffed the towel into the pocket of his trousers, letting it dangle down his leg, and reached out to steady himself against the bar. The underside of Cradle and the matching surface below it had been designed so that a disk of air would be trapped between them during the final meter of the descent, and act as a cushion. This was allowed to escape through a picket fence of vents, aimed upward around the periphery of Cradle, and so final docking was, as usual, signaled by a roar of escaping air and plumes of condensed humidity jetting upward into the blue sky over the Andes. The mildest of lurches caused stored glasses and tableware to clink together in cabinets all over the bar.