Learning the World

He stepped over and peered into my eyes. I noticed a tiny shake of his head, as if something that might have been in my eyes wasn’t there (a nictitating membrane, I now realise). He led me over to the aircraft, motioned me to sit in the front and lower seat, showed me how to strap up, and passed me a set of wraparounds, transparent and tinted. I slipped them on. He climbed in behind me and started the engine. The propeller was behind us both, the wing above. After the engine had built up some power the little machine shook and quivered, then shot to the edge of the platform and dropped off. I may have squealed. It dipped, then soared. My stomach felt tugged about. Wind rushed past my face. The collar of my jacket crept up over the top and sides of my head, and stiffened. I hadn’t known it had that capability.

We flew in an irregular spiral, perhaps to avoid stair-ladders and other obstacles invisible to me, but always up. I looked down, at the ground. I could see houses and vehicles, but not people. Other small aircraft buzzed about the sky, at what seemed frighteningly short clearances. The air felt thi

“I thought we were going to fly all the way,” I said, trying not to sound querulous.

“The air doesn’t go all the way to the sunline,” Constantine told me. “So we will take the lift.”

I followed him across the broad floor to an inconspicuous door. Behind it was an empty lift, big enough to hold about a dozen people. Its walls were transparent, giving a view of a dark chasm within which gigantic shapes moved vertically, illuminated by occasional random lights. The doors hissed shut and the lift began to ascend. So rapid was its acceleration that my knees buckled. Constantine grasped my shoulder.

“Steady,” he said. “It doesn’t get worse than carrying someone piggyback.”

Vaguely affronted, I straightened up and stared out. Looking down made me dizzy, so I looked up. The space in which we moved was in fact quite shallow in relation to its size. We were headed for a bright spot above, which I knew to be some manifestation of the sunline. The lift decelerated far more gradually and gently than it had accelerated. As it did so, I found that I was becoming lighter. An experimental downward thrust of the toes sent me a metre into the air. I yelled out, startled and delighted, as I fell back.

Constantine laughed. “Hold the bar,” he said.

The lift halted, as if hesitating, then shot upward again. We passed through a hatch or hole. For a moment I was pressed against the wall of the lift; then I found myself weightless. Constantine glided over my head, twisting and somersaulting at the same time. I let go of the bar, flailing. The sensation of falling was for a moment terrifying. My stomach heaved, then settled.

“It’s all right,” he said. “We’re in the forward cone now.” The teeth of his smile were a vivid white. He caught my elbow and swung me onto his back. I gripped fistfuls of fabric at his shoulders and clung. He gri

I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again we had reached our destination. We floated near the floor of the biggest enclosed space I’d ever been in, apart from the world itself. The floor was smooth, and extended far ahead of us, and curved up on either hand like a smaller version of the curve of the world. Up and down had in a ma

Constantine reached around and disengaged me from his back. We drifted for a few minutes, hand in hand.

“I never knew the world had a name,” I said.

“I named it,” said Constantine.

“Why did you call it that?” I asked.

He swung me and caught my other hand, like a dancer, and once again gazed into my face as if looking for something.

“You’ll know one day,” he said.

I know now.

Horrocks Mathematical blinked away the girl’s biolog. It seemed that like all of the ship generation she was maturing on schedule. He himself had gone through adolescence, five or six years ago now, without any such epiphany. The Mathematical were tenth-generation crew and Horrocks had never had to suffer a grounded upbringing. Although born in the ship he did not consider himself or his cohort part of the ship generation. They were among the youngest members of the crew, that was all. Through the foliage of the air-tree and the skin of the bubble in which he floated he could see the land twenty-five kilometres below — its parks and copses, rivers and lakes, estates and towns an ideal of sava

The air-tree, growing from a hydroponic tank, its branches grafted to form an open wickerwork sphere, was about fifty metres in diameter and five years older than he was. Horrocks pushed through the lianas that crisscrossed its interior and thrust himself out into the greater confinement of the bubble. He had work to do. The bubble was one of scores strung on a circular cable around the sunline like beads on a bangle. The cable contra-rotated the ground, putting the bubbles in an approximation of free fall. Only the slight intermittent backward tug of the small jets that countered the effect of the ship’s deceleration broke the spell, but that was all they broke.