…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.