"This is boring," Gwen said after they had walked for a few minutes. "The sameness is too depressing. And I don't see any maps, either. I'm surprised people don't get lost."
"I imagine they could just ask the Voice for directions," Dirk said.
"Yes. I forgot about that." She frowned. "What happened to the Voice? It hasn't had much to say lately."
"I shut it up," Dirk told her. "But it's still watching."
"Can you get it working again?"
He nodded and stopped, then led her toward the nearest of the black doors. The compartment, as he'd expected, was unoccupied, and opened easily at his touch. Inside, the bed, the layout, the viewscreen– everything was the same.
Dirk turned on the viewscreen, pressed the button marked with a star, then turned the set off again.
"Can I help you?" the Voice asked.
Gwen smiled at him; a thin, strained sort of smile it was. She was as tired as he was, it seemed. There were worry lines around the corners of her mouth.
"Yes," she said. "We want something to do. Entertain us. Keep us busy. Show us the city." Dirk thought that she spoke a trifle too quickly, like someone frantic to distract herself and take her mind off an unpleasant subject. He wondered whether it was fear about their safety he was hearing, or possibly concern about Jaan Vikary.
"I understand," the Voice replied. "Let me be your guide, then, to the wonders of Challenge, the glory of ai-Emerel reborn on distant Worlorn." Then it began to direct them, and they walked to the nearest bank of tubes, out of the realm of endless straight cobalt corridors, into regions more colorful and diverting.
They ascended to Olympus, a plush lounge at the very summit of the city, and stood ankle deep in black carpet while they looked out of Challenge's single vast window. A kilometer below them rows of dark clouds scuttled by, racing on a bitter wind they could not feel. The day was dim and gloomy; the Helleye burned and glowered as always, but its yellow companions were hidden by gray haze smeared across the sky. They could see the distant mountains from their tower, and the faint dark green of the Common far beneath them. A robowaiter served them iced drinks.
They walked to the centershaft, a plunging cylinder that cored the tower-city from top to bottom. Standing on the highest balcony, they held hands and looked down together, past other balconies in never-ending rows that dwindled into dim-lit depths. Then they opened the wrought-iron gate and jumped, and hand-in-hand they floated down in the gentle grip of the warm updraft. The centershaft was a recreational facility, maintained at a trace gravity that was hardly great enough to be called a gravity at all-less than.01 percent Emereli normal.
They strolled the outer concourse, a broad slanting corridor that spiraled around and around the rim of the city like the threading on some vast screw, so that an ambitious tourist could walk from the ground level to the top. Restaurants, museums, and shops lined both sides of the concourse; in between were deserted traffic lanes for both the balloon-tired cars and faster vehicles. A dozen slidewalks-six up, six down-formed the median strip of the gently curving boulevard. When their feet grew tired, they climbed onto a belt, then to a faster one, then onto one faster still. As the scenery slid by, the Voice pointed out items of particular interest, none of which were particularly interesting.
They swam nude in the Emereli Ocean, a freshwater pseudo sea that occupied most of the 231st and 232nd levels. The water was bright green crystal, so clean that they could see algae twisting in sinuous ropes on the bottom two levels below. It sparkled beneath panels of lights that gave the illusion of bright sunshine. Small scavenger fish darted to and fro in the lower reaches of the ocean; on the surface, floating plants bobbed and drifted like giant mushrooms done up in green felt.
They used power-skis to descend the ramp, a plunging, bracing flight over low-friction plastic that took them from the hundredth level all the way down to the first. Dirk fell twice, only to bounce back up again.
They inspected a free-fall gymnasium.
They looked into darkened auditoriums built for thousands, and declined to view the taped holoplays the Voice offered.
They ate, briefly and without relish, at a sidewalk cafe in the middle of a once-busy shopping mall.
They wandered in a jungle of twisted trees and yellow moss where the animal sounds were all on tape and echoed strangely off the walls of the hot, steamy park.
Finally, still restive and worried and only a little distracted by it all, they allowed the Voice to whisk them up to their room. Outside, they had been told, true dusk was settling over Worlorn.
Dirk stood in the narrow space between the bed and the wall as he pressed the buttons in sequence. Gwen sat just behind him.
Ruark was a long time answering, too long. Dirk wondered apprehensively if something terrible had happened. But just as he thought it, the throbbing blue call signal faded out, and the plump face of the Kimdissi ecologist filled the screen. Behind him, in a grayish pall, was the dirt of a deserted apartment.
"Well?" Dirk said. He glanced back at Gwen. She was chewing the edge of her lip, and her right hand was still, resting on the jade-and-silver bracelet that she wore yet on her left forearm.
"Dirk? Gwen? Is this you? I cannot see you, no, my screen is dark." Ruark's pale eyes flicked back and forth restlessly beneath lank strands of paler hair.
"Of course it's us," Dirk snapped. "Who else would call this number?"
"I cannot see you," Ruark repeated.
"Arkin," Gwen said from where she sat on the bed, "if you could see us, then you'd know where we were."
Ruark's head bobbed. He had just the slightest suggestion of a double chin. "Yes, I did not think, you are right. Best that I do not know, yes."
"The duel," Dirk prompted. "This morning. What happened?"
"Is Jaan all right?" Gwen asked.
"No duel," Ruark told them. His eyes still flicked back and forth, searching for something to look at, Dirk supposed. Or perhaps he was nervous that the Kavalars would burst in on him in the vacant apartment. "I went to see, but no duel, utter truth."
Gwen sighed audibly. "Then everyone is all right? Jaan?"
"Jaantony is alive and well, and Garsey, and the Braiths," Ruark said. "No shooting or killing at all, but when Dirk did not come to die on schedule, everyone got crazy, yes."
"Tell me," Dirk said quietly.
"Yes, well, you were the cause of the other duel being postponed."
"Postponed?" said Gwen.
"Postponed," Ruark replied. "They will still fight, same mode and weapons, but not now. Bretan Braith appealed to the arbiter. He said he had a right to face Dirk first, since he might die in the duel with Jaan and Garsey, so his grievance against Dirk would go unsettled. He demanded that the second duel be stayed till Dirk could be found. The arbiter said yes to him. A Braith tool, the arbiter, yes, agreed with everything the animals wanted. Roseph high-Braith, they called him, an utter malevolent little man."
"The Ironjades," Dirk said. "Jaan and Garse. Did they say anything?"
"Jaantony, no. He said nothing at all, no, just kept standing very still in his corner of the death-square. All the rest of them were running around, shouting and yelling and being Kavalar. Nobody else was even in the square but Jaan, no, but he kept standing there looking around, like he expected the duel to start any second. Garsey, now, he got very angry. First, when you did not come, he made jokes about you being sick, then he got very cold and silent for a time, quiet as Jaan was, but later he was a little less angry, I think, so he began to argue with Bretan Braith and the arbiter and the other dueler, Chell. All the Braiths were here, to witness perhaps. I did not know we had so much company in Larteyn, no. Well, I did abstractly, yes, but it is different when they come together all in one place. A pair of Shanagates came also, though not the Redsteel poet, so we were short three, you two and him. Otherwise, perhaps it was a city council meeting, everyone dressed up formally." He chuckled.