Across the Spectrum (40 page)

Elli turned to him and squeezed his shoulder. “You’ve got
great wings, Gee-Em’s chop, and a good set of flight muscles—I’m looking
forward to seeing your first real flight.” She smiled. “Maybe we can fly
together.”

“That’d be great! Maybe we can all meet at the aerie.”

Much of the rest of the journey to the Node was spent playing
simgames, which he kept winning until Ama, Elli, and Tulli ganged up on him in
a three-destroyer-versus-battlecruiser scenario that ended in a spectacular
explosion. After that, they all talked and joked. Being the center of attention
was an unfamiliar and heady sensation for Taj, so he barely noticed their
impending arrival until one especially funny story made him laugh so hard he
floated out of his seat. They were at the Node, the main link between Sundara
and its highdwellings, and the Thousand Suns beyond.

From there it was a short shuttle flight to Talajara
Highdwelling. Taj didn’t see Naramutro on the little ship, but Ama merely said
that her brother would probably take a different flight. Taj couldn’t decipher
her expression.

From the shuttle they disembarked into an enormous ring
concourse that circled the inside of one of Talajara’s end caps, the one his
highdweller friends called the south pole. There, close to the spin axis, the
gravity was about one-eighth of Sundara’s, but if Taj moved slowly the sticky
shoe covers he had been issued let him walk almost normally.

Taj looked around, and what he saw made him dizzy. To either
side of him the floor curved up under a ceiling perhaps fifty meters high, both
paralleling in miniature the curve of the habitat’s sides. In the distance,
before the ceiling cut off his view almost a half kilometer away, he could see
the tiny figures of people hurrying about canted over at an angle of forty-five
degrees to him. He knew that at every point along the concourse, spin-gravity
was straight down, but he still couldn’t quite shake the feeling that at any
moment all of those people would suddenly come sliding down into a giant heap,
with him at the bottom.

Ahead, looking down the length of Talajara through the
opening at the edge of the curved floor and ceiling of the concourse, Taj saw a
huge smile-shaped slice of blue sky with strange hook-topped clouds ringing a
pair of enormous glowing tubes. The tubes speared out overhead and converged in
the misty distance, a blindingly bright spot of light midway along each of
them. And farther out he saw what appeared to be islands hanging in the sky—or
were they mountains?

His planet-bred mind couldn’t make sense of the scene, which
pulled him forward, his friends following silently. As he approached the edge,
he realized that the concourse was nothing more than a huge balcony overlooking
the interior of Talajara, with no concessions to the fears of downsiders. Only
a low railing separated him from a sheer four-kilometer drop.

On the railing Taj saw a bright red sign with a chilling
message:

ATTENTION TRAVELERS: DROPPING AN OBJECT FROM HERE
IS PUNISHABLE BY DEATH!

A moment’s thought told him why: the surface of Talajara was
rotating at more than seven hundred kilometers per hour with respect to the
spin axis, so an object of any significant weight falling from here would hit
with incredible force: a kind of trash meteorite.

But then Taj forgot everything else as he got his first look
at the interior of Talajara.

He stood for a long time at the railing, at the edge of a
green cliff covered with vines bearing sweet-smelling flowers. The cliff
dropped sheer to a cottony cloud layer that obscured the view directly below,
but farther away the clouds broke up a little, revealing the distant inner
surface of the highdwelling. A tapestry of villages and fields interspersed
with tall buildings stretched into the hazy distance, stitched through with the
bright gleaming of streams and ponds. The far end of Talajara was invisible,
while to either side the land curved up into dizzying overhangs—what his eyes
had first seen as mountains—that were lost in the dazzle of the diffusers
overhead, the huge tubular structures stretching from pole to pole that
delivered sunlight to the interior.

It was beautiful and utterly strange. Every time he looked
straight ahead, it was pretty much like being in an aircar on Sundara. But then
the disorienting landscape curving up on either side, with buildings jutting
sideways out of huge green overarching cliffs, reminded him he was inside an
enormous cylinder. He knew that to the people in those buildings, he would be
the one apparently hanging sideways. Thinking about it made him dizzy all over
again.

“The aerie’s at the north pole,” said Ama. “Where are you
staying?”

As he opened his mouth to answer, his boswell buzzed with a
locate signal and a swift glitter in the distance arrested his attention.
Between one breath and another it swooped up and resolved into an incredibly
ancient human enclosed in a shimmering bubble. Taj couldn’t see the machinery
that kept the geebubble weightless, just a kind of spindly chair in which the
nuller was seated. The geebubble hesitated momentarily in front of him before
darting over the railing and into the concourse. Taj twisted to face the bubble
as it abruptly stopped and hovered a few centimeters off the floor. He found
himself face to face with his ancestor twelve generations removed.

Gee-Em’s face was deeply seamed with wrinkles, her eyes a
fierce bright blue, and only the long iron gray hair floating loose around her
head identified her as female, so much had three and a half centuries of life
withered her. Her limbs, as far as Taj could see in the enveloping folds of the
garment floating around her, were incredibly thin. But her bare hands and feet
were strong and sinewy, as were her wrists and ankles. A constant breeze blew
from the bubble, generated by the gravitational difference between its
weightless interior and the outside. The breeze smelled of roses and dust.

“Greetings, Tajarivani vlith-Ramajugandra,” she said in a
surprisingly strong voice. Her use of the inheritance prefix “vlith”
acknowledged his position as heir. Next to him he felt Elli’s sudden stare fall
on him.

Taj bowed in a full formal deference, feeling awkward, a
sensation intensified by the fact that Gee-Em floated at a slight angle to the
floor. He found himself leaning sideways as they talked.

“You do me honor,” he replied. Her meeting him here, instead
of waiting for him to come to her, was an inversion of the usual etiquette.

“Not honor but necessity,” she said, waving aside formality
with a graceful gesture. “I’m afraid the press of business will keep me from my
duties as your host, at least for a short time, so I have arranged for your
lodging at the Hack.”

“Oh! I . . . Thank you!”

As he spoke, Taj heard the sharp intake of breath from his
three friends. The Hack was the ultra-exclusive hotel near the Talajara aerie
that catered specifically to flyers. Then, noting the direction of Gee-Em’s
gaze, he collected himself and introduced his suddenly shy companions.

But Gee-Em quickly put them at ease with a brief
conversation with each
—
not like grown-ups usually did, but as if she
really cared about what they said, as if they were responsible adults. Taj suddenly
realized that, as old as she was, there probably wasn’t all that much
difference to her between people his age and adults his parents’ age.

“Of course, I needn’t inquire about your interests,” she
said to Taj with a smile that made her face even more wrinkly, if that were
possible. She motioned at his wing pack. “I’m sure you’re eager to put those to
use—Apodines, aren’t they?”

He nodded dumbly. Then her boswell chimed.

“Your pardon, greatson, but time presses,” she said after a
glance at her wrist. She waved toward the railing. “And the clouds are calling
you.”

He bowed deeply, realizing the interview was at an end; but
then she squinted at him, her gaze suddenly sharp. “You watched the
orientation, did you not?”

“Umm . . . yes.”

“Very well. Fair winds to you, then. And to you all.”

With that, her bubble spun about and darted off down the
concourse, skimming over the heads of the hurrying throng until it disappeared
above the curve of the ceiling.

“I wonder what it’s like to fly in a geebubble,” said Elli.

“She seemed a little abrupt,” commented Ama.

“My dad says that nullers don’t like to waste time,” said
Tulli. “’Cause they’ve seen enough of it go by to know how valuable it is.”

But Taj said nothing. What would she have said if he’d
admitted he hadn’t watched the whole vid? Why was it important to her?

His anxiety lasted long after his friends left, promising to
meet him at the aerie the next morning. Even the astounding luxury of the Hack
didn’t entirely shake it. He fell asleep still wondering if he’d made a
mistake.

The next morning, before dawn, a hotel aircar took him to
the aerie, where he found Ama, Elli, and Tulli waiting for him. Naramutro was
there as well. Taj braced himself for a confrontation as he held out the red
feather given him by Gee-Em, but the other boy was carefully polite, and to
Taj’s surprise, he assigned him and his friends one of the best sets of perches
in the aerie. Not that Naramutro stiffed himself; Taj noticed that he took up a
position nearby.

As they unpacked their wings the diffusers slowly kindled
near the other pole. The bright spot of light relayed by the huge mirrors
outside the highdwelling would move slowly along the length of the diffusers
until it reached this pole and put an end to flying for the day—the heat generated
wind currents too unpredictable for even the most skillful flyers. As the light
in the diffusers swelled, it gradually revealed an astonishing waterfall
cascading in a feathery spiral around the north pole of Talajara down to the
rain forest below. A fitful breeze carried its muted thunder to their ears.

They chatted quietly while they inspected their wings. A
flyer’s wing sets actually had two pairs of wings, like dragonflies, plus a
tail, manipulated by the legs and feet, for directional control. The first set
of wings, the lift wings, didn’t move, but could be tilted and trimmed to
change the amount of lift generated. The other pair, the flight wings, actually
propelled the flyer, whose arms and chest muscles moved them in a circular
motion, cupping the air and pushing back and down. The flight angle of the
wings and their quillions—dyplast feathers—were coordinated by a computer
operated by the flight gloves.

Ama carefully unfolded her Diomedes, which had short flight
wings and long, graceful lift wings for slow, soaring flight. Elli, it turned
out, had a pair of Jihari Tiercels, designed for fast flight and dramatic
dives. Tulli carefully combed the quillions on the flight wings of an old pair
of Megharan Passerines before putting them on while he watched Taj spread the
colorful lift wings of his Apodines. Taj felt Naramutro watching him. He smiled
to show there were no hard feelings, but the other boy turned away and launched
himself out into the air. His wings looked like they might be Apodines, too.

“Come on,” said Tulli when they all had their wings on.
“Let’s go!”

Taj stood for a moment, feeling an unfamiliar vertigo as he
watched his friends launch themselves out into the air, with Talajara’s distant
surface curving up cliff-like on either side. It was so different from the
simulator: most of his flying had been done over planetary landscapes that
existed only in the imagination of artists, and the WingWorld bubbloid was far
smaller than Talajara.

A group of kids swooped by, led by Naramutro. One of them
cocked his head toward Taj and sneered, “Mudfoot.”

Taj flushed, flexed his legs, and jumped. Low gee was low
gee. As the strong strokes of his wings caught the cool air, the familiar
excitement of flight wiped away his doubts.

At first he stayed with his friends, darting around Ama as
she soared, mock dogfighting with Elli in her more maneuverable wings, and
briefly playing tag with Tulli and some other kids. But, to his surprise, he
found he was a better flyer than any of them.

Later, during a brief rest on his perch, he watched the
flyers around Naramutro, now including Elli, play an unfamiliar version of
scoopball, which he’d often practiced in the simulator. They used the standard
gear: helmets with a scoop on top that was used to catch and then launch a
small ball. But here there was no playing space and no goal hoops. They just
tossed the ball and retrieved it in darting swoops. He couldn’t figure out the
point.

Tulli landed next to him, followed by Ama.

“What happens if they drop the ball?” asked Taj, remembering
the sign on the concourse.

“It’s got a gas cylinder in it that triggers if they lose
it,” said Tulli. “It balloons up and floats back up to the axis.”

Suddenly Naramutro flew up and hovered in front of them.
“I’ve been watching you,” he said. “You’re not too bad, for a downsider—you
want to try some real flying?”

“AyKay,” replied Taj, feeling a tingle of excitement in his
chest.

“Be careful,” whispered Ama. “They fly rough. And Nara’s
still angry about the simgame; he doesn’t like to lose.”

“I’ll look out,” he said, warmed by her concern.

“Just work with me,” said Elli, who had flown up as
Naramutro darted away. “I’ll show you the moves.”

At first Taj felt a little clumsy, not fully understanding
the strategy of the game, but he soon caught on. The goal mostly seemed to be
to swoop in and intercept the ball before another flyer could catch it; but
there was an elaborate etiquette of avoidance and alliance that he slowly came
to understand with Elli’s help.

After a while he sensed the attitudes of the others
changing. A couple of them actually cheered when he pulled off a graceful
chandelle, reversing direction at the point of a stall to slip under the ball
and snatch it away only inches from Elli’s scoop. She laughed and fell away in a
reverse loop; he launched the ball toward her, only to have it intercepted by
Naramutro.