“If that’s what they’re buying, then that’s what we’re selling,” Killeen said. “Cermo! Heave ass down that alley and sight on those far clouds.”

“What spectrum?”

“Give me a see-through, infra or better.”

Cermo swaggered forward, decked out in full field regalia, clicking and rattling with techno-ornaments. His fine-webbed electronets seethed with energy. Antennas embedded at shoulder, waist, and butt looked every-which-way, in full 3D. His weaponry was polished from long hours of care and repair on ship, but still pitted and burnished from a thousand forays.

Toby recalled the times when such gear was everyday wear for all Bishops. They had been on the move, their sensoria stretched out to max perimeter, each Bishop a sentinel. For years after the Calamity they had roamed like that, rising weary, red-eyed, and sore each morning, to a world drawing always dryer, with hunger and mech pursuit the only constants.

Locals peeped at them from around distant corners. They seemed interested and amused. Rats in bow ties.

Cermo clumped down an alleyway and into an open area, where he could get a full sight on the far horizon.

Toby couldn’t figure out the sky here. He knew this wasn’t a planet, not by any stretch, but still there were billowy white clouds drifting not far above the stunted buildings. There had even been a thunderstorm, catching them on the hike back to Argo’s berth. That had startled him—pure, tasty water falling from a sky like God’s gift. He hadn’t seen such a tasty shower since he was a boy, had played for hours in its mud.

—and at once was in a torrent, a downpour, spattering crystal droplets over his face. Her face. Her face. Endless gouts and flurries of blessed clear streaming cold, a waterfall hammering and thundering down a mountainside, she standing gleefully under it, yellow party dress plastered to her slim legs, a young girl getting ecstatically drenched—

The intrusion was sudden, raking across his mind. Shibo. Her rising buttresses, flanked by granite masses. He felt within her Personality a sweeping reach, the sinks and hollows of another’s interior self, a fresh continent spread bone-broad before him. The waterfall faded. Rain fell in the great distance, slanting from troubled clouds, signature of her own sad presence.

You have not summoned me forth for some time.

“I’ve been busy.” Something in the waterfall, the pleasures of it, made him uneasy. He noticed that he had a hard-on, and hoped she wouldn’t.

I know how hard it is to get along with your father. I did, once.

“He’s running the show, sure, but . . . I just don’t feel easy about it.”

He is the man whose sense of opportunity has brought you far, so very far—

“I don’t know what he’s after anymore.”

I believe his goals are as ever. But he is a man who hides his inner self, now. A Cap’n must.

“Not from me, he doesn’t.”

As if from a great distance, she said,

Even from you. You are becoming a man, more than a son.

He coughed to cover the dark seethe within him. His erection would not go away and he was breathing deeply, mind buzzing.

“Clouds’re pretty thick,” Cermo sent back. “Can’t see much. In the far infra the view’s all jiggledy.”

“Now there’s a fine tech word,” Jocelyn joshed him.

“Jiggledy how?” Killeen asked.

“Looks like they reflect the city itself. I mean, stronger I look, more I get wavy pictures of streets, buildings.”

Shibo receded. Toby had focused his attention on the conversation around him and she had faded into the background. He concentrated, to push her further back. Made himself breathe slower. He couldn’t see anything through the clouds.

Cermo sent, “Microwave says it’s solid up there.”

“Solid?” Killeen nodded to himself. “Fits, yeasay.”

<I agree. We are in a rotating tube, so broad that water condenses along its axis, forming cloud banks. If we could see clearly across, we would see more of this city hanging above us. How the rotation is achieved in this puzzling place I do not know.>

“Glad to see you getting humble, ol’ cockroach,” Toby said. He wanted to cheer up the lumbering shape, but Cermo’s discovery made his voice shake a little. A city dangling over him, with nothing at all to hold it, kept up by some invisible law of physics—the thought made him hunch down a little, until he noticed and stood up straight again.

Three arms of ruby shell reached down suddenly and plucked Toby up above the street cobblestones. They swung him playfully to and fro, then dumped him onto the flat yellow carapace behind Quath’s head. “Hey!”

<Perhaps you will learn more from a higher perspective.>

“Whoosh! Not that there’s so much to see. I was already taller than the street signs. Funny names, aren’t they?”

The Bishop party was crossing Peach Boulevard on Pomegranate Camino Real, names Toby had to call up his Isaac Aspect to understand were mouth-watering ancient fruits—but there wasn’t a plant in sight.

<I find their reluctance to divulge data about this place suspicious.>

“If I take the measure of them right,” Killeen said, “they don’t give anything away free.”

Toby said, “Yeasay—downright nasty.”

<The Illuminates spoke of your tribal habits, the great variation in custom. They disagree over whether this is a source of your strengths, or a subtle weakness.>

“Ummm, maybe both. See, we’re used to people helping each other automatically, no questions asked. These folk don’t think like that—which implies a lot.”

<Such nuances of primate behavior are beyond my kind.>

“Simple, really,” Killeen said. “They aren’t under threat all the time. Comfortable people can afford to be choosy.”

Toby thought about that. “Could mean they’re pretty used to strangers, too.”

<I see your implication.>

“Oh? And what’s that?” Toby didn’t have any deeper idea, but he wasn’t going to acknowledge that here, the only kid among adults. You kept your luck to yourself.

<There are many more people within this structure than we see. Enough to make most be strangers.>

“Ummmm.” Killeen watched their guards edgily. “Could be.”

Toby felt edgy, as though some game was going on just beyond his seeing. Killeen was composed, controlled, giving nothing away. As he fretted over this he glanced down an alleyway and saw a building in the distance abruptly seem to melt, windows and arches dissolving, turning a mottled green. “Look!” It reformed itself with a freshly slanted roof, a new line of windows.

Killeen’s eyes narrowed. “That fits, too,” he said distantly.

“Fits what?” Toby watched new doorways pop open, ovals instead of the earlier strait-edged type.

“This city’s a kind of tech we’ve never seen. And I’ll bet it runs itself.”

Cermo sent a puzzled murmur. “Itself? Andro—”

“He’s a clerk.” Killeen gave Andro a bland smile, amused that they could talk this way right next to him. “These people, they’re no higher level than we are, come right down to it.”

“They sure don’t seem like they could build a Chandelier,” Cermo said.

“They didn’t,” Toby said firmly. “Don’t expect them to ever admit it, though.”

He walked past a splashing fountain, ideas tumbling fruitlessly, and felt a tilting, a rising presence—

—She moved lithely, inspired, skipping from stone to stone across the broken road, puddles from the night fogs showing her self and counter-self in the shredding gray light. Playing in the fresh dawn’s ruins. Jagged teeth from a night raid. Stumps of stone. A spider slept within the city, she saw it silver-fine and waiting. Stirring its barbed legs, the razor rub unheard beneath the waking bustle of her loved Citadel, fine and forlorn and always waiting for the next blow. Yet joy seeped from every moment. Shapes swarmed through this morning, the eternal going of people about their busyness, to strive against and fail and strive again. Even though they knew that the spider waited too, rustling in the eyesocket of a bleached skull—