Yet someone had imagined more. As the elevator rose, faster and faster it seemed as the air thinned, Qiingi tried to enter this manifold, see the world as the coronal's creator must have seen it. He could not Down at the spur, the mountains had seemed like giant waves flinging themselves up Teven Coronal's side wall.
That wall had stretched off into white haze to either side; there was no sense of scale to it. Now as the elevator rose it came clear the wall seemed infinite only if he looked straight up. To either side its distant top became visible, a knife-edge with
black above it.
All his life, Qiingi had known the four cardinal directions: if you looked north or south you saw these gigantic walls, but east and west it was different. Far beyond their blurred horizons stood two pillars of up-sweeping blue and white. They curved toward the zenith, narrowing and fading into an ethereal white until they met somewhere behind the suns, an arch bigger than worlds. Qiingi's people called that arch Thunderbird's Door.
He had always known that the arch was an optical illusion; only now did it really hit home. He was rising up the inside wall of a ring two thousand kilometers in diameter and five hundred wide. The walls cupped an ocean of atmosphere and at its bottom lay the carefully sculpted landscape of whole continents.
Was Raven's people really just another carefully crafted segment of coronal shell, five or ten meters thick with vacuum below it? The hills he had climbed as a child, hollow and metal? Of course they were; and it shouldn't matter. He had known this all along, he had known it, surely he had. What did it matter to the hawk and the otter that their world was artificial? It shouldn't matter to him, either.
He fought back tears and turned away.
No one had spoken since they began this ascent. Time seemed stretched, as if each second was an hour. But if Qiingi glanced at the wall behind him, it fell past with an uncanny speed.
One of the boxes burst open in a white cloud of ice. Aaron closed it again by sitting on it. "We're nearly at vacuum," he said. "A real workout for our angels." Nobody laughed.
Qiingi thought about what Livia had said. He had believed that her strength came from a belief that the world was wider than any one manifold. Because she knew that, she could put her own world away when needed, and trade her ghahlanda for that of another place. So Qiingi had believed.
He still believed that. But she didn't.
"There," said Aaron. "Our destination." He pointed up and to one side. Qiingi followed his gaze.
Something perched on the very edge of the wall top, which was now only a few kilometers overhead. Unfamiliar with such things, it took him a while to realize that the tiny square object was a house.
Livia stood, her misery temporarily forgotten. "Aaron! That can't be real. Who would be insane enough ... T
Aaron shrugged. "We never found out. Maybe Raven himself. I learned about the place from my uncle. He said he found it thirty years ago. It had been abandoned a long time by then. But it's not the only building on the top of the walls, Livia. There's a whole city on the north side; and there's lots of other places, some like this, some totally alien looking. You can find them with a good telescope, they're usually at the top of the coronal's built-in elevators like the one we're riding."
They stood watching as the top of the wall approached. The house blazed brilliant against the black sky; it was lit not from above, but from the side. The vertical surface of the wall below it also glowed, fading gradually over hundreds of meters. "See the way it shines," said Aaron. "That house is the first thing you've ever seen that's lit directly by the sun." Qiingi looked up; the suns he had grown up knowing as the most constant of things were now faint curved slits in blackness. For the first time in full daylight he could see the edges of the vast oval mirror that slowly spun in the open center of the coronal ring. Teven Coronal rotated at right angles to the sun, and the oval mirror directed light down onto the ring's inner surface. The mirror itself turned, slower than Teven, to create a twenty-four-hour day. From here the mirror's edge looked crisp and clear, as if it were only meters away. It was at least two hundred kilometers above him.
Then they rose onto the glowing section of wall, and sunlight burst on Qiingi from the side. He looked out over the well of light that was Teven, and saw the true sun of humanity rising slowly over the north wall of the world. His first real sunrise. It declared his entire previous existence a lie.
He couldn't think; couldn't even breathe for a few moments. With a start he realized they had stopped rising. Aaron was opening the metal gate of the cage, his expression resolute.
"I'm glad you convinced us to do this, Livia," Aaron said. 'Td forgotten what it was like up here. From here you can see the truth: 3340 may be conquering every manifold in the coronal, but now it's clear just how small mat conquest really is."