Flux xs-3

by Stephen Baxter

  If Farr had closed his eyes he might have imagined he was listening to an old, time-beaten man like Adda rather than a boy at the start of his life. “But at least the City keeps you fed, and safe, and comfortable.”

  “But not everyone wants to be comfortable. Isn’t there more to life than that?” He looked at Farr again with that odd tinge of envy. “That’s what Surfing offers me… Your life, in the upflux, must be so — interesting. Waking up in the open Air, every day. Never knowing what the day is going to bring. Having to go out and find your own food, with your bare hands…” Cris looked down at his own smooth hands as he said this.

  Farr didn’t know what to reply to all this. He had come to think of the City folk as superior in wisdom, and it was a shock to find one of them talking such rubbish.

  Looking for something to say, he pointed to the board Cris was still cradling. “What’s this?”

  “My board. My Surfboard.” Cris hesitated. “You’ve never seen one before?”

  Farr reached out and ran his fingertips over the polished surface. It was worked so finely that he could barely feel the unevenness of the wood; it was like touching skin — the skin of a very young child, perhaps. The mesh of shining threads had been inlaid into a fine network of grooves, just deep enough to feel.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “Yes.” Cris looked proud. “It’s not the most expensive you can get. But I’ve put a hell of a lot of work into it, and now I doubt there’s a better board this side of Pall Mall.”

  Farr hesitated, embarrassed by his utter ignorance. “But what’s it for?”

  “For Surfing.” Cris held the board out horizontally and flipped up into the Air, bringing his bare feet to rest against the ridged board. The board drifted away from him, of course, but Farr could see how expertly Cris’s feet moved over the surface, almost as if they were a second pair of hands. Cris held his arms out and swayed in the Air. “You ride along the Magfield, like this. There’s nothing like it. The feeling of power, of speed…”

  “But how? Do you Wave?”

  Cris laughed. “No, of course not.” Then he looked more thoughtful. “At least, not quite.” He flipped off the board, doing a neat back-somersault in the cramped room, and caught the board. “See the wires inlaid into the surface? That’s Corestuff. Superconducting. That’s what makes the boards so damn expensive.” He rocked the board in the Air with his arms. “You work it like this, with your legs. See? It’s like Waving, but with the board instead of your body. The currents in the superconductors push against the Magfield, and…” He shot his hand through the Air. “Whoosh!”

  Farr thought about it. “And you can go faster than Waving?”

  “Faster?” Cris laughed again. “You can be faster than any car, faster than any farting pig — when you get a clear run, high above the Pole, you feel as if you’re going faster than thought.” His expression turned misty, dreamlike.

  Farr watched him, fascinated and curious.

  “So that’s what the board is for… sort of. But it’s also my way out of here. Out of my future. Maybe.” Cris seemed awkward now, almost shy. “I’m good at this, Farr. I’m one of the best in my age group; I’ve won a lot of the events I’ve been eligible for up to now. And in a couple of months I qualify for the big one. The Games. I’ll be up against the best, my first chance…”

  “The Games?”

  “The biggest. If you do well there, become a star of the Games, then Parz just opens her legs for you.” Cris laughed coarsely at that, and Farr grinned uncertainly. “I mean it,” Cris said. “Parties at the Palace. Fame.” He shrugged. “Of course it doesn’t last forever. But if you’re good enough you never lose it, the aura. Believe me… Will you still be around, for the Games?”

  “I don’t know. Adda…”

  “Your friend in the Hospital. Yeah.” Cris’s mood seemed to swing to embarrassment again. “Look, I’m sorry for going on about Surfing. I know you’re in a difficult situation.”

  Farr smiled, hoping to put this complex boy at his ease. “I enjoy hearing you talk.”

  Cris studied Farr speculatively. “Listen, have you ever tried Surfing? No, of course you haven’t. Would you like to? We could meet some people I know…”

  “I don’t know if I’d be able to.”

  “It looks simple,” Cris said. “It is simple in concept, but difficult to do well. You have to keep your balance, keep the board pressed between you and the Magfield, keep pushing down against the flux lines to build up your speed.” He closed his eyes briefly and rocked in the Air.

  “I don’t know,” Farr said again.

  Cris eyed him. “You should be strong enough. And, coming from the upflux, your sense of balance and direction should be well developed. But maybe you’re right. You’re barrel-chested, and your legs are a little short. Even so it mightn’t be impossible for you to stay aboard for a few seconds…”

  Farr found himself bridling at this cool assessment. He folded his arms. “Let’s do it,” he said. “Where?”

  Cris grinned. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

  * * *

  Ito took Dura to the Museum.

  This was situated in the University area of the City — far Upside, as Dura was learning to call it; in fact, not very far below the Palace itself. The University was a series of large chambers interconnected by richly paneled corridors. Ito explained that they weren’t allowed to disturb the academic calm of the chambers themselves, but she was able to point out libraries, seminar areas filled with groups of earnest young people, arrays of small cells within which the scholars worked alone, poring over their incomprehensible studies.

  The University was close to the City’s outer wall, and was so full of natural light the Air seemed to glow. There was an atmosphere of calm here, an intensity which made Dura feel out of place (even more than usual). They passed a group of senior University members; these wore flowing robes and had shaved off their hair, and they barely glanced at the two women as they Waved disdainfully past.

  She leaned close to Ito and whispered, “Muub. That Administrator at the Hospital. He shaved his head. Does he belong here too?”

  Ito smiled. “I’ve never met the man; he sounds a little too grand for the likes of us. But, no, if he works at the Hospital he has no connection now with the University. But he may once have studied here, and he wears the bald fashion as a reminder to the rest of us that once he was a scholar.” Her smile was thin, Dura thought, and tired-looking. “People do that sort of thing, you know.”

  “Did you — study — at the University? Or Toba?”

  “Me?” Ito laughed, gently. “Do I look as if I could ever have afforded it?… It would be wonderful if Cris could make it here, though. If only we could find the fees — it would give him something higher, something better to aim for. Maybe he wouldn’t waste so much time on that damn Surfboard.”

  The Museum was a large cube-shaped structure at the heart of the University complex. It was riddled with passageways and illumination shafts, so that light seeped through the whole of its porous bulk. As they moved slowly through the maze of passageways, the multitude of ports and doorways seemed to conceal a hundred caches of treasure.

  One corridor held rows of pigs, rays and Crust-spiders. At first the creatures, looming out of the darkness, made Dura recoil; but she soon realized that these animals were no threat to her — and never would be to anyone else. They were dead, preserved somehow, fixed to the walls of this place in grim parodies of their living postures: gazing at the magnificent, outstretched wings of a ray, pinned against a frame of wood, Dura felt unaccountably sad. A little further along a display showed an Air-pig — dead like the others, but cut open and splayed out with its organs — small masses of tissue fixed to the inner wall of the body — now glistening, exposed for her inspection. Dura shuddered. She had killed dozens of Air-pigs, but she could never have brought herself to touch this cold, clean display.

  Oddly, there was no smell in these corrido
rs, either of life or death.

  They came to an area containing human artifacts. Much of it was from the City itself, Dura gathered, but from ages past; Ito laughed as she pointed to clothes and hats mounted on the walls. Dura smiled politely, not really seeing the joke. There was a model of the City, finely carved of wood and about a mansheight tall. There was even a lamp inside so that the model was filled with light. Dura spent some time peering at this in delight, with Ito pointing out the features of the City. Here was a toy lumber train entering one of the great ports Downside, and here was the Spine leading down into the underMantle; tiny cars carrying model Fishermen descended along the Spine, seeking lodes of precious Corestuff. And the Palace at the very crown of the City — at the farthest Upside of all — was a rich tapestry glowing with life and color.

  Further along, there were small cases containing artifacts from outside the City. Ito touched her arm. “Perhaps you’ll recognize some of this.” There were spears and knives, all carved from wood; she saw nets, ponchos, lengths of rope.

  Upfluxer artifacts.

  None of them looked as if they had come from the Human Beings themselves. But, said Ito, that wasn’t so surprising; there were upfluxer bands all around the fringe of Parz’s hinterland, right around the Star’s Polar cap. Dura studied the objects, aware of her own knife, her rope still wrapped around her waist. The things she carried wouldn’t be out of place inside one of these displays, she realized. With a tinge of bitterness, she wondered if these people would like to pin her and her brother up on the walls, like that poor, dead ray.

  Finally, Ito brought her to the Museum’s most famous exhibit (she said). They entered a spherical room perhaps a dozen mansheights across. The light here was dim, coming only from a few masked wood-lamps, and it took some time for Dura’s eyes to adapt to the darkness.

  At first she thought there was nothing here, that the chamber was empty. Then, slowly, as if emerging from mist, an object took shape before her. It was a cloud about a mansheight across, a mesh of some shining substance. Ito encouraged her to move a little closer, to push her face closer to the surface of the mesh. The exhibit was like a tangled-up net, composed of cells perhaps a handsbreadth across. And Dura saw that within the cells of the main mesh there was more detail: sub-meshes, composed of fine cells no wider than a hair-tube. Perhaps, Dura wondered, if she could see well enough she would find still more cells, almost invisibly tiny, within the hair-scale mesh.

  Ito showed Dura a plaque on the wall, inscribed with text on the display. “ ‘The structure is fractal.’ ” Ito pronounced the word carefully. “ ‘That is, it shows a similar structure on many scales. Corestuff lends itself to this property, being composed of hyperons, bags of quarks in which are dissolved the orderly nucleons — the protons and neutrons — of the human world.

  “ ‘In regions humans can inhabit Corestuff exists in large metastable islands of matter — the familiar Corestuff bergs retrieved by Fishermen, and used to construct anchor-bands, among other artifacts…

  “ ‘But further in, in the deep Core, the hyperonic material can combine to form extraordinary, rich structures like this model. The representation here is based on guesswork — on fragmentary tales from the time of the Core Wars, and on half-coherent accounts of Fishermen. Nevertheless, the University scholars feel that…’ ”

  “But,” Dura interrupted, “what is it?”

  Ito turned to her, her face round and smooth in the dim light. “Why, it’s a Colonist,” she said.

  “But the Colonists were human.”

  “No,” Ito said. “Not really. They abandoned us, stealing our machines, and went down into the Core.” She looked somber. “And this is what they became. They lived in these structures of Corestuff.”

  Dura stared into the deep, menacing depths of the model. It was as if, here in the belly of the City, she had been transported to the Core itself and left to face this bizarre, monstrous entity alone.

  8

  Clutching his Surfboard, Cris led Farr through the heart of the City.

  They followed a tangle of subsidiary streets, avoiding the main routes. Farr tried to memorize their path, but his rudimentary sense of City-bound direction was soon overwhelmed. Lost, baffled, but following Cris doggedly, he involuntarily glanced around, looking for the Quantum Sea, the angle of the vortex lines to orient himself. But of course, here deep in the guts of Parz, the faceless wooden walls hid the world.

  After a time, though, he realized that they must have passed below the City’s rough equator and moved into the region called the Downside. The walled streets here were meaner, with illumination shafts and wood-lamps far separated. There were few cars and fewer Wavers, and the doors to dwelling-places off the Downside streets, battered and dirty, looked impenetrably solid. Cris didn’t comment on the changed environment — he kept up his chatter of Surfing as if oblivious — but Farr noticed how the City boy kept his precious board clutched tight against his chest, shielding it with his body.

  At length they came to a wide, oval port set in a street wall. The shaft beyond this port, about ten mansheights across, was much plainer than any City street — long and featureless, and with scuffed, unfinished-looking walls — but it led, Farr saw, to an ellipse of clear, precious Airlight. He stared hungrily into that light, marveling at how the bright yellow glow glittered from scraped-smooth patches of wall.

  “Are we going down here?”

  “Through this cargo port? Out through the Skin? But that’s against City ordinances…” Cris grinned. “You bet we are.” With a whoop, Cris placed one hand on the lip of the elliptical entrance and somersaulted into the shaft. His board clutched above his head, he flapped his arms, Waving in reverse feet-first down the shaft. Farr, clumsier, clambered over the lip of the port and plunged down. Laughing, their voices echoing from the wooden walls, the boys tumbled toward the open Air.

  Farr shot out of the oppressive wall of the City and spread his arms and legs, drinking in the yellow-shining Air and staring up at the arc of the vortex lines.

  Cris was looking at him skeptically. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m just glad to be out in the Air… even if it is this sticky Polar stuff.”

  “Right. Not like back in the good old upflux, eh?” Cris leveled his board, flexed it with the palm of his hand experimentally against the Magfield.

  Farr rolled luxuriously in the Air. The port they’d emerged from was a rough-rimmed mouth set in the wooden outer hull — the Skin — and it loomed around them still, as if threatening to snap down on them, to swallow them back into the City’s wooden guts. But the boys were drifting in the Air, away from the City, and Farr saw that this port was just one of an array of similar entrances which stretched across the face of the City in all directions, as far as he could see. Farr tried to pick out identifying features of “their” port, so he could find it again if he needed to. But it was simply a crudely finished gash in the wooden Skin, unmarked, with nothing to distinguish it from a hundred others. Farr soon gave up the effort of memorizing. After all, if he did get lost, even if he found this particular port again he’d never find his way back to the Mixxaxes’ home through the City streets.

  He flipped his legs and pulled a little further away from the City. The Skin was like a gigantic mask, looming over him. This close he could see its detail — how it was crudely cobbled together from mismatched sections of wood and Corestuff — but it was hugely impressive nevertheless. The dozens of cargo ports in this part of the Skin were, he thought, like mouths, continually ingesting; or perhaps like capillary pores, taking in a granular Air of wood and food. As he pulled back still further he saw the huge, unending falls from the sewage outlets spread across the base of the City; the roar of the semisolid stuff tumbling into the underMantle seemed to fill the Air.

  The City — battered and imperfect as it might be — was magnificent, he realized slowly; it was like an immense animal, noisily alive, utterly oblivious of his own tiny presence before its fac
e.

  He heard his name called.

  He glanced around, but Cris had gone. Farr felt an absurd stab of disorientation — after all, he had a far smaller chance of getting lost out here than in the City’s guts — and twisted, staring around. There was Cris, his orange coverall bright, a distant, Waving figure suspended on his Surfboard. He was close to the Skin but far above Farr’s head. He’d slipped away while Farr was daydreaming.

  Embarrassed, a little irritated, Farr thrust at the Air, letting the upfluxer strength in his legs hurl him toward Cris.

  Cris watched him approach, grinning infuriatingly. “Keep up. There are people waiting for us.” He clambered back onto his board, turned and led the way.

  Farr followed, perhaps a mansheight behind; one after the other the boys soared over the face of the City.

  Cris’s Surfing technique was spectacular, bearing little relation to the cut-down caricature he had shown Farr inside the City. Cris pivoted the gleaming board under one bare foot while thrusting with the other heel at the back of the board, making it Wave vigorously. His bare soles seemed able to grip at the surface’s fine ridges. He kept his arms stretched out in the Air for balance, and the muscles in the City boy’s legs worked smoothly. The whole process looked wonderfully easy, in fact, and Farr felt a dull itch — in the small of his back and in his calves — as he stared at Cris. He longed to try out the Surfboard for himself. Why, with his enhanced strength, here at the Pole, he could make the damn thing fly…