Flux

28

The Interface was glowing.

The shouting woke Borz from a deep, untroubled sleep. He stretched and scowled around, looking for the source of the trouble. He reached to his belt and pulled out his Air-hat, jammed it on his head. He didn’t really need the hat, of course, but he thought it gave him a bit more authority with the scavenging, thieving upfluxers who came by all the time and…

The Interface was glowing. The edges around its four triangular faces were shining, vortex-line-blue, so bright he was forced to squint. And the faces themselves seemed to have been covered over by a skin of light, fine and golden, which returned reflections of the yellow Mantle-light, the vortex lines, his own bulky body.

A deep, superstitious awe stirred in Borz.

There was no sign of the pigs, which had been stored at the heart of the tetrahedron. And the various possessions — clothes, tools, weapons — which had been attached to the tetrahedron’s struts by bits of rope and net now tumbled around in the Air. A length of rope drifted past him. He grabbed it and laid it in his huge palm; the rope looked scorched.

People, adults and children alike, were Waving away from the Interface, crying and wailing in their panic. Borz — and two or three of the other men and women — held their place.

The Interface hadn’t worked for generations — not since the Core Wars; everyone knew that. But it was obviously working now. Why? And — Borz ran a tongue over his hot, Airless lips, and he felt the pores on his face dilate — and what might be coming through it?

The face-light died, slowly. The faces turned transparent once more. The glow of the tetrahedral frame faded to a drab blackness.

The Interface was dead again; once more it was just a framework in the Air. Borz felt an odd, unaccustomed stab of regret; he knew he’d never again see those colors, that light.

The pigs had gone from the heart of the framework. But they’d been replaced by something else — an artifact, a clumsy cylinder of wood three mansheights tall. There were clear panels set in the walls of the cylinder, and bands of some material, dully reflective, surrounded its broad carcass.

A hatch in the top of the cylinder was pushed open. A man — just a man — pushed his face out; the face was covered by an extravagant beard.

The man grinned at Borz. “What a relief,” he said. “We needed some fresh Air in here.” He looked down into the cylinder. “You see, Dura, I knew Karen Macrae would get us home.”

“Hey.” Borz Waved with his thick legs until his face was on a level with the strange man’s. “Hey, you. Where are our pigs?”

“Pigs?” The man seemed puzzled, then he looked around at the dead Interface. “Oh. I see. You kept your pigs inside this gateway, did you?”

“Where are they?”

The man looked amused, but sympathetic. “A long way from here, I fear.” He sniffed the Air and stared around, his gaze frank, confident and inquisitive. “Tell me, which way’s South?”