Flux

11

The chamber where they were to board the Bell was at the very base of the City. The chamber had walls, an upper surface — but no floor. Farr, following Hosch and Bzya, clung to guide ropes and gazed down into clear Air, drinking in its freshness after days of the stale stenches of the Harbor. He was aware of the immense mass of the City above him; it creaked softly, like some brooding animal.

The Bell itself was a sphere of hardened, battered wood two mansheights across. Hoops of Corestuff were wrapped around it. The Bell was suspended from an immense pulley which was almost lost in the darkness above Farr’s head. More cables attached the Bell loosely to the Spine. Farr could make out pale patches in the dimness above, faces of Harbor workers close to the pulley.

The Spine was a pillar of wood which plunged, trailing cables, out of this chamber and speared through the thick Air beneath the City. It turned into a dark line, barely visible, curving slowly to follow the flux of the Magfield. Cables trailed along its length to reach far, far down, into the distant, bruised-purple, lethal mass of the underMantle.

Farr, following the Spine’s curve, felt his heart slow inside him.

The Bell seemed impossibly fragile. How could it possibly protect him from dissolution in the depths of the underMantle, hovering over the boiling surface of the Quantum Sea itself? Surely it would be crushed like a leaf; no wonder so many Fishermen lost their lives.

Hosch opened up a large door in the side of the Bell and clambered stiffly inside. Bzya prodded Farr forward. As he approached the sphere Farr saw how badly scuffed and scratched the outer surface was. He ran a finger along one deep scar; it looked as if some animal had attacked this fragile-looking device, gouging it with teeth or nails.

Reassuring, he thought drily.

Farr had expected the interior of the Bell to be something like Mixxax’s car, with its comfortable seats and light-admitting windows. Instead he entered a pocket of gloom — in fact he almost collided with Hosch. The only windows were small panels of clearwood which hardly admitted any light; woodlamps gave off a smoky, apologetic green glow. There was a pole running the length of the sphere’s axis, and Farr clung to this. There was a small control panel — with two worn-looking switches and a lever — and the hull was bulky with lockers and what looked like tanks of Air.

Bzya lumbered into the Bell. The interior was suddenly crowded; and as the Fisherman’s huge hands wrapped around the support pole the Bell was filled with Bzya’s strong, homely stench. Hosch clambered around them both to pull closed the hatch — a massive disc of wood which fitted snugly into its frame.

They waited in the almost complete gloom. There was a busy scraping from all around the hull. Farr, peering through the windows, saw Harbor workers adjusting the position of the Corestuff hoops so that they surrounded the sphere evenly, covering the hatchway. Farr glanced from Hosch to Bzya. Bzya returned his stare with a patient acceptance, the darkness softening the lines of his scars. The supervisor glared into space, angry and tense.

There was a humming, strangely regular. The whole craft vibrated with it. It seemed to permeate his very being; he could feel his capillaries contracting. He looked at Bzya, but the Fisherman had closed his good eye, his face set; his damaged eyecup was a tunnel to infinity.

…And something changed. Something was taken away from Farr, lifted for the first time in his life. The only time he had felt anything remotely like this was during that last, fateful hunt with the Human Beings, when he had experienced that disorienting fear of falling. What was happening to him? He felt his grasp of the support pole loosen, his fingers slip from the wood. He cried out, drifting backward.

Bzya’s strong hand grasped his hair-tubes and hauled him back to the pole; Farr wrapped his arms and legs around the solidity of the wood.

Hosch was laughing, his voice grating.

Somebody rapped on the Bell with a heavy fist. Now there was a sensation of movement — jerking, swaying; Farr could hear cables rattle against the Bell and against each other.

So it had begun. In brisk, bewildering silence, they were descending toward the underMantle.

“The boy hasn’t been prepared for any of this, Hosch.” There was no trace of anger in Bzya’s voice. “I told you. How can he function if his ignorance leaves him paralyzed by fear?”

“Talk to the upfluxer if you want.” The supervisor turned his thin, creased, self-absorbed face away.

“What’s happening to me, Bzya? I feel strange. Is it just because we’re descending, following the Spine?”

“No.” Bzya shook his head. “We are descending, but it’s more than that. Listen carefully, Farr; it’s important that you understand what’s happening to you. Maybe it will keep you alive.”

These words, simply spoken, evoked more fear in the boy than all of Hosch’s ranting. “Tell me.”

“As we descend, the Air gets thicker. You understand that, don’t you?…”

Farr understood. In the deadly depths of the underMantle, pressures and densities were so great that nuclei were crammed together, forced into each other. It was impossible for the structures of bonded nuclei which composed human bodies — and all the material which comprised Farr’s world — to remain stable. The nuclei dissolved into the neutron superfluid that was the Air; and protons freed from the nuclei formed a superconducting fluid in the neutron mix.

At last, from the Quantum Sea inward, the Star was like a single, immense nucleus; no nuclear-based life could persist.

“How can this Bell of wood protect us? Won’t the wood just dissolve?”

“It would… if not for the Corestuff hoops.” The hoops were hollow tubes of hyperonic Corestuff. The tubes contained proton superconductor, extracted from the underMantle. More tubes led up through the cables to dynamos in the Harbor which generated electrical currents in the Bell’s hoops.

“The currents in the hoops generate huge magnetic fields,” Bzya said. “Like our own Magfield. And they protect us. The fields are like an extra wall around the Bell, to insulate it from the pressures.”

“But what’s making me feel so strange? Is it this magfield of the Bell’s?”

“No.” Bzya smiled. “The hoops are expelling the Magfield — the Star’s Magfield, I mean — from the interior of the Bell.

“We all grow up in the Magfield. The Magfield affects us all the time… We use the Magfield to move about, when we Wave. Farr, for the first time in your life you can’t feel the Magfield… For the first time, you can’t tell which way up you are.”

There was no way of tracking time. The silence was broken only by the clatter of cables, the dull thud of the body of the Bell against the Spine, and the almost subvocal, angry mumblings of Hosch. Farr kept his eyes closed and hoped for sleep.

After an unknowable period the Bell gave a savage lurch, almost jolting the axial bar from Farr’s hands. He clung to it, peering around the dimly lit cabin. Something had changed; he could feel it. But what? Had the Bell hit something?

The Bell was still moving, but the quality of its motion had changed — or so the pit of his stomach told him. They were still descending, he was sure; but now the Bell’s descent was much smoother, and the occasional collisions of the Bell against the Spine had ceased.

It felt as if the Bell were floating, loose, through the underMantle.

Bzya laid a massive, kindly hand on his arm. “It’s nothing to fear.”

“I’m not…”

“We’ve come free of the Spine, that’s all.”

Farr felt his eyes grow round. “Why? Is something wrong?”

“No.” The cabin’s small, woodburning lamps sent a soft glow into the pit of Bzya’s ruined eye. “It’s designed to be this way. Look, the Spine only goes down a meter or so from the City. That’s deeper than anyone could Wave unaided. But we have to go much, much deeper than that. Now our Bell is descending without the Spine to guide it.

“The cables still connect us to Parz. And the current they’re carrying will continue to protect us, and the cable, from the conditions here, as long as we descend. But…”

“But we’re drifting. And our cable could tangle, or break. What happens if it breaks, Bzya?”

Bzya met his gaze steadily. “If it breaks, we don’t go home.”

“Does that ever happen?”

Bzya turned his face to the lamp. “When it does, they can tell almost immediately, up in the Harbor,” he said. “The cable starts to run free. You know the worst straight away. You don’t have to wait for the empty end to be returned…”

“And us? What would happen to us?”

Hosch pushed his thin face forward. “You ask a lot of stupid questions. I’ll give you some comfort. If the cable breaks, you won’t know anything about it.” He made his hand into a loose fist and snapped it closed in Farr’s face.

Farr flinched. “Maybe you should tell me what else can kill me. Then at least I’ll be prepared…”

There was a crash which jarred him loose from the support pole. The Bell swayed, rocking through the thick fluid of the underMantle.

Farr found himself floundering in the Bell’s stuffy Air. Once again he needed Bzya to reach out and haul him back to the central post.

Bzya raised a silencing finger to his lips; Hosch merely glowered.

Farr held his breath.

Something scraped across the outside hull of the Bell; it was like fingernails across wood. It lasted a few heartbeats, and then faded.

After a few minutes of silence, the lurching, unsteady journey continued; Farr imagined meters of cable above his head, kinks mansheights tall running along its length.

“What was that?” He glanced up at the windows, which grudgingly admitted a diffuse purple light. “Are we in the Quantum Sea?”

“No,” Bzya said. “No, the Sea itself is still hundreds of meters below us. Farr, we’re barely going to penetrate the upper layers of the underMantle. But we’re already a couple of meters below the Spine now.”

“Yeah,” said Hosch, his deep eyes fixed on Farr. “And that was a Colonist, come back from the dead to see who’s visiting him.”

Farr felt his mouth drop open.

“It’s a Corestuff berg,” Bzya said steadily. “Corestuff. That’s all.”

Hosch sneered, his gaze sliding around the cabin.

Farr knew Hosch was taunting him, but the sudden shock of the words had penetrated his imagination. He had always enjoyed Core War stories, had relished staring into the unachievable surface of the Quantum Sea and frightening himself with visions of the ancient, altered creatures prowling its depths. But the stories of the War, of humankind’s loss, had seemed so remote from everyday experience as to be meaningless.

But Dura had told him of the fractal sculpture she had seen in Parz’s University — a sculpture of a Colonist’s physical form, Ito had said. And now he was descending into the underMantle himself, protected only by a rickety, barely understood technology.

He clung to the post, staring at the bruised light in the windows.

Again there was a scraping against the hull. Again the Bell swayed, causing Farr’s stomach to lurch.

This time, Hosch and Bzya did not seem surprised. Hosch turned to press his face to a window, while Bzya relaxed his grip on the support post and flexed the fingers of his immense hands.

“What is it now?” Farr whispered.

“We think we’ve snagged a berg…”

Below the surface of the Quantum Sea, nuclei — clusters of protons and neutrons — could not survive. And deeper still, in the dark belly of the Sea itself, densities became so high that the nucleons themselves were brought into contact. Hyperons, exotic combinations of quarks, could form from the colliding nucleons. The hyperons could combine into stable islands of dense material — Corestuff bergs — which could persist away from the formative densities of the heart of the Star. The bergs drifted up, in Quantum Sea currents, to higher levels to be retrieved by the Fishermen and returned to Para City.

“It’s clinging to the outside of the Bell,” Bzya said. He mimed the impact of the berg against the Bell with his fists. “See? It’s drawn there by the magnetic field of the Bell, of its Corestuff hoops. And it stays, stuck by the Magfield set up in response in its own interior.”

Hosch grinned again, and Farr was aware of the supervisor’s foul breath. “Good Fishing. We were lucky. We can’t be more than four meters below Parz. Now, boy. Watch.” With a grandiloquent gesture, Hosch closed the two switches on the small control panel beside him.

Farr held his breath, but nothing seemed to have changed. The Bell still swayed alarmingly through the underMantle — in fact it seemed to be rotating, his stomach told him, perhaps knocked into a twist by the impact of the berg.

Bzya said patiently, “He’s sent a signal to the Harbor, along the cables. That we’re ready to be hauled up.”

Hosch grinned at him. “And that’s why we’re here, boy. That’s the reason they put men in these cages, and stuff them down into the underMantle. All to close those little switches. See? Otherwise, how else would the Harbor know when to haul up the Bells?”

“Why three of us? Why not just one Fisherman?”

“Double redundancy,” Hosch said. “If something hit the mission — well, one of us might live long enough to throw the switches, and bring home the precious Corestuff.” He was obviously relishing teasing out Farr’s fear.

Farr tried to bite back. “Then you should have told me what was going on before. What if something had gone wrong, and I hadn’t known what to do?”

Bzya regarded Hosch impassively. “The boy has a point, Hosch.”

“Anyway,” Farr said, “it can’t take much skill to throw a simple switch…”

“Oh, that’s not the skill,” Hosch said quietly. “The skill is in staying alive long enough to do it.”

The Bell lurched alarmingly through the underMantle, unbalanced by the mass of Corestuff clinging to its side. Farr tried to judge their ascent, but he couldn’t separate genuine indications of their rise to the light — the sensations in his belly, a lightening of the gloom in the small windows — from optimistic imagination. He gazed anxiously at the bruised-purple glow in the windows, unable to take any of the food Bzya offered him from a small locker set in the hull of the Bell.

The Bell shuddered under a fresh impact. Farr clung to his pole. There was a grinding noise, and the clumsy little craft shuddered to a halt.

Farr resisted the temptation to close his eyes and curl up. What now? What else can they throw at me?

He felt Bzya’s rough fingertips on his shoulders. “It’s all right, lad. That’s a sign that we’re nearly home.”

“What was it?”

“That was our berg, scraping against the Spine. We’re only a meter or so below Parz itself now.”

Hosch hauled at a lever on the control panel, grunting with the effort; the hum Farr had learned to associate with the currents supplying the Bell’s protective magnetic field decreased in intensity. Hosch turned to him, his mood evidently swinging toward its calm, sly pole. “Your buddy here is half-right. But we aren’t safe yet. Not by a long way.”

In fact this was one of the most dangerous parts of the mission. The berg, rattling against the Spine, could easily sever their cables or damage the Spine itself.

“So,” Hosch said silkily, “one of us has to go outside and do some work.”

“What work?”

“Wrap ropes around the berg. Lash it to the Bell,” Bzya said gently. “That’s all. Stops the berg from shaking loose, and protects the cables from collisions with the Corestuff.”

Hosch was staring at Farr.

Bzya held up his huge hands. “No,” he said. “Hosch, you can’t be serious. You can’t send the boy out there.”

“I’ve never been more serious,” Hosch said. “As you’ve both been telling me, the boy won’t last five heartbeats down here unless he learns the trade. And there’s only one way to do that, isn’t there?”

Bzya made to protest, but Farr stopped him. “It’s all right, Bzya. I’m not afraid. He’s probably right, anyway.”

Bzya said, “Listen to me. If you were not afraid you would be a fool, or dead. Fear keeps your eyecups open and clean.”

“Ropes in that locker,” Hosch said, pointing.

Bzya started to haul out the tightly packed, thick ropes; soon the little cabin seemed filled with the stuff. “And you,” Hosch snapped at Farr. “Get the hatch open.”

Farr looked through the window. The Air — if it could be called Air, this deep — was purple, almost Sea-like. He was still, after all, a full meter — a hundred thousand mansheights — below Parz.

He felt the sole of a foot in his back. “Get on with it,” Hosch growled. “It won’t kill you. Probably.”

Farr put his shoulders to the circular hatch and pushed. It was heavy and stiff, and as he pushed he heard the scraping of the Corestuff hoops binding up the capsule as they slid away.

The hatch burst open, flying out of his reach. The Air outside the Bell was thick and glutinous, and it crowded into the cabin, overwhelming the thinner, clear Air within. The light of the cabin’s lamps seemed immediately dimmed.

Farr held his breath, his mouth clamped closed almost of its own accord. There was a pressure on his chest, as if the thicker Air were trying to force itself into his lungs through his skin. With an effort of will he dragged his lips apart. The cloying, purple Air forced its way into his throat; he could feel it on his lips, viscous and bitter. He heaved, expanding his lungs; the stuff burned as it worked through his capillaries.

So, after a brief few heartbeats of struggle, he was embedded in the underMantle. He raised his arms experimentally, flexing his fingers. His movements were unimpaired, but he felt weaker, sluggish. Perhaps the superfluid fraction of this Air was lower than in the true Mantle.

“The hatch,” Bzya said, pointing. “You’d better retrieve it.” Bzya’s voice was obscured, as if he was speaking through a layer of cloth.

Farr nodded. He pushed his way out of the hatchway.

The yellow-purple Air was so thick it barely carried any illumination; it was as if he was suspended in a dark-walled bubble about four mansheights across. The Bell was suspended at the center of the bubble, a drifting bulk. Beyond it the Spine was a wall, massive and implacable, its upper and lower extremes lost in the misty obscurity of the Air. Looking at the Spine now Farr could see cables of Corestuff wrapped around it and laid out along its length — cables which must provide a magnetic field like the Bell’s, to keep the Spine from itself dissolving in the lower underMantle. The Bell’s own cables snaked up and out of sight toward the world of the upperMantle, a world which seemed impossibly distant to Farr.

The loose hatch was a short distance from him. He Waved to it easily enough, although the Air in which he was embedded was a cloying presence around him. He caught the hatch and returned it briskly to Bzya.

“Now the berg,” Hosch called. “Can you see it?”

Farr looked. There was a shape, lumpen, lodged between the Bell and the Spine. It was half a mansheight long, dark and irregular, like a growth on the clean, artificial lines of the Bell.

“Don’t I need the ropes?”

“Go and inspect the berg first,” Hosch called. “See if it’s done us any damage.”

He took deep breaths of the stale Air and flexed his legs. It would take only a few strokes to Wave to the lump of Corestuff.

As he neared, he saw that the berg’s surface was made rough by small pits and escarpments. It was hard to imagine that this was the material that formed the gleaming hoops around the Bell, or the City’s anchor-bands, or the fine inlays in Surfboards. He was within an arm’s length of the berg, still Waving smoothly… If he lived long enough, he would like to see the workshops — the foundries, Bzya called them — where the transformation of this stuff took place…

Invisible hands grabbed his chest and legs, yanking him sideways. He found himself tumbling head over heels away from the Bell. He cried out. He scrabbled at the Air but could gain no purchase, and his legs thrashed at the emptiness in a futile effort to Wave.

Trembling, he paddled at the Air, trying to still his roll. Hosch was laughing at him, he realized; and Bzya, too, seemed to be having trouble suppressing a smile.

Just another little game, then; another test for the new boy.

He closed his eyes, willing the trembling of his limbs to still. He tried to think. Invisible hands? Only a magfield could have jolted him like that — the Bell’s protective magfield. And of course he’d been knocked sideways; that was the way fields affected moving charged objects, like his body. That was why it was necessary, when Waving, to move legs and arms across the flux lines of the Magfield to generate forward motion.

So the Bell’s own magfield shell had thrown him. Big joke.

Logue would probably have told him off for not anticipating this, he realized. Laughed at him as well, to drive home the point.

Farr’s fear turned to anger. He looked forward to the day when he would no longer have so much to learn… and he could maybe administer a few lessons of his own.

His self-control returning, Farr began to make his clumsy way back to the Bell. “Give me the ropes,” he said.