Accompanied by a nervous-looking nurse from the Hospital of the Common Good, the injured old upfluxer diffidently entered the Palace Garden. When Muub spotted him he beckoned to the nurse — over the heads of curious courtiers — that she should bring the upfluxer to join him at the Fount. Then he turned back to the slow ballet of the superfluid fountain.

The Garden was a crown perched atop Parz City, an expensive setting for the Palace of the City Committee. The Garden had been established generations before by one of the predecessors of Hork IV. But it had been the particular genius of the current Chair, and his fascination for the natural world around him, that had made this place into the wonder it was. Now it was a lavish park, with exotic plants and animals from all around the Mantle brought together in an orderly, tasteful display. The low — but extravagant — buildings which made up the Palace itself were studded around the Park, gleaming like Corestuff jewels set in rich cloth. Courtiers drifted through the Garden in little knots, huddling like groups of brightly colored animals.

Muub was no lover of the great outdoors, but he relished the Garden. He tilted back his stiff neck, looking up into the yellow-gold Air. To be here beneath the arching, sparkling vortex lines of the Pole — and yet securely surrounded by the works of man — was a fulfilling, refreshing experience. It seemed to strengthen his orderly heart that the Garden was an artifact, a museum of tamed nature — but an artifact which stretched for no less than a square centimeter around him… The Garden was enough to make one believe that man was capable of any achievement.

He ran a discreet doctor’s eye over the approaching upfluxer. Adda was recovering well but he could still barely move without assistance. Both his lower legs were encased in splints, and his chest was swathed in bandages; a cast of carved wood enclosed his right shoulder. His head, too, was a mass of strapped-up cloth, and an eye-leech patiently fed in the corner of the old fellow’s only working eye.

“I’m glad you could join me,” Muub greeted him with a professional smile. “I wanted to talk to you.”

Adda glowered past his leech at Muub’s shaved head, his finery. “Why? Who or what are you?”

Muub allowed himself a heartbeat’s cold silence. “My name is Muub. I am Physician to the Committee… and Administrator of the Hospital of the Common Good, where your injuries have been treated.” He decided to go on the offensive. “Sir, we met before, when you were first carried into the Hospital by one of our citizens. On that occasion — though I don’t expect you to remember — you told me to ‘bugger off.’ Well, I failed to accept that invitation, choosing instead to have you treated. I have asked you to view the Garden today as my guest, as a friendly gesture to one who is new to Parz and who is alone here. But frankly, if you’re not prepared to be courteous then you are free to depart.”

“Oh, I’ll behave,” Adda grumbled. “Though I’ll not swallow the pretense that you’ve done me any sort of favor by treating my injuries. I know very well that you’re exacting a handsome price from the labor of Dura and Farr.”

Muub frowned. “Ah, your companions from upflux. Yes, I understand they have found indentures.”

“Slave labor,” Adda hissed.

Muub made himself relax. Anyone who could survive at the court of Hork IV could put up with a little goading from an eyeless old fool from the upflux. “I’ll not let you needle me, Adda. I’ve invited you here to enjoy the Garden — the spectacle — and I fully intend that that is how we will spend the day.”

Adda held his stare for a few moments; but he did not pursue the discussion, and turned his head to view the Fount.

The superfluid fountain was the centerpiece of the Garden. It was based on a clearwood cylinder twenty microns across, fixed to a tall, thin pedestal. Inside the cylinder hovered a rough ball of gas, stained purple-blue, quivering slowly. The cylinder — fabulously expensive in itself, of course — was girdled by five hoops of polished Corestuff, and it bristled with poles which protruded from its surface. Barrels — boxes of wood embossed with stylized carvings of the heads of Hork IV and his predecessors — were fixed to the ends of the poles inside the cylinder.

Beautiful young acrobats — male and female, all naked — Waved spectacularly through the Air around the cylinder, working its elaborate mechanisms. The electric blue of the vortex lines cast shimmering highlights from the clearwood, and the soft, perfect skin of the acrobats glowed with golden Air-light.

The upfluxer, Adda, made a disgusting noise through his nose. “You brought me here to see this?”

Muub smiled. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand what you’re seeing.”

Adda scowled, his hostility evident. “Then tell me.”

“Superfluidity.” Muub pointed. “The cylinder contains a low-pressure region. There’s hardly any Air in there, I mean… except for the sphere in the center. That’s just Air, but stained blue so you can see it. The hoops around the cylinder, there, are generating a localized magnetic field. Do you understand me? Like the Magfield, but artificial. Controllable. The magnetic field keeps the cylinder from being crushed by the pressure of the Air outside. And it’s designed to keep the little Air inside the cylinder in that ball at the center.”

“So what?”

“So we can view the Air — within which we are ordinarily immersed — from the outside, as it were.

“Adda, Air is a neutron superfluid — a quite extraordinary substance which, were inhabitants of some other world to discover it, would seem miraculous. Quantized circulation — the phenomena which causes all the spin in the Air to collect into vortex lines — is only one aspect. Watch, now, as the vessels are lowered and raised from the sphere of Air.”

A handsome young acrobat — a girl with blue-dyed hair — grasped one of the poles protruding from the cylinder and pushed it through the clearwood wall. The base of the ornate barrel at its far end dipped into the sphere of blue Air. The barrel wasn’t completely immersed; the girl held the barrel still so that its rim protruded from the surface of the Air by a good two or three microns.

Blue-stained Air visibly crawled up the sides of the box and over the lip, pooling inside. It was like watching a living creature, Muub thought, fascinated and charmed as always by the spectacle.

When the box had filled itself to the level of the rest of the sphere, the acrobat drew it slowly out of the sphere and brought it to rest again, so that its base was placed perhaps five microns above the surface. Now the blue Air slid over the sides and, in a thin stream which poured from the base of the vessel, returned eagerly to the central sphere.

The acrobat troupe maintained this display at all hours of the day, at quite remarkable expense. Adda watched the cycle through a couple of times, his good eye empty of expression.

Muub watched him surreptitiously, then shook his head. “Don’t you have any interest in this? Even your eye-leech is showing more awareness, man!” He felt driven, absurdly, to justify the display. “The Fount is demonstrating superfluidity. When the vessel is lowered into the pool, a thin layer of the fluid is adsorbed onto the vessel’s surface. And the Air uses that fine layer — just a few neutrons thick — to gain access to the interior of the vessel. When the vessel’s withdrawn the Air uses the same channel to return to the main bulk, the sphere. Quite remarkable.

“The hoops maintain a slight magnetic gradient from the geometric center of the cylinder. That gradient restricts the residual Air to that sphere at the center… and it is the resulting difference in electromagnetic potential energy which drives the cycle of the fountain. And…”