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Lea are arguing again."
Toba's car had approached unnoticed. Dura had been laboring to fix ropes to a section of collapsed
Skin. She backed away from her work, her arms and hands aching. Even here, on the outer surface of
the dispersing cloud of debris that marked the site of the ruined City, the heat and noise were all but
unbearable, and the work was long, hard and dangerous. As she listened now, she could hear the raised
voices of Lea and Mur. She felt a prickle of irritation how long was she going to have to hand-hold
these people, before they learned to work together like adults?
But as she studied Toba's familiar round face with its uncertain expression, its pores dilated in the
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heat the irritation vanished as soon as it had come. She straightened up and smiled. "Nice to see you,
farmer."
Toba's answering smile was thin. "You look tired, Dura... We're all exhausted, I suppose. Anyway,"
with a touch of strain entering his voice, "I'm not a farmer any more."
"But you will be again," Dura said, Waving toward him. "I'm sorry, Toba."
Stretching the stiffness out of her back, she looked around the sky. The vortex lines had reformed and
now crossed the sky in their familiar hexagonal arrays, enclosing, orderly and reassuring; the Magfield,
restored to stability, was a firm network of flux in the Air a base for Waving, for building again.
She studied the lines, examining their spacing through her fingers. Their slow pulsing told her that it would
soon be time for Hork's Wheel ceremony, at the heart of the ruined City.
"How's the farm?" she asked carefully. "Is Ito..."
"We're putting it back together again," Toba said. "Slowly. Ito is... bearing up. She's very quiet." For a
moment his small, almost comical mouth worked as if he were struggling to express his feelings. "You
know Farr's there with her. And some of Cris's friends, the Surfers. Cris has gone. But I think Ito finds
the young people around her a comfort."
Dura touched his arm. "It's alright. You don't have to say anything. Come on; maybe you can help me
sort out Lea and Mur..."
Toba climbed out of his car.
Together, they made their way through the City site. Parz had become a cloud of floating fragments of
Skin, twisted lengths of Corestuff girder, all suffused by the endless minutiae of the human world, spilled
carelessly into the Air. She could see, at the cloud's rough center, the execution Wheel, cast adrift from
the old Market. Even from this vantage point close to the cloud's outer edge Dura could see clothes,
toys, scrolls, cocoons, cooking implements: the contents of a thousand vanished homes. Those few
sections of the City which had survived the final Glitch continued to collapse spasmodically even now,
weeks after the withdrawal of the Xeelee and to the careless eye the swarms of humans crawling over
the floating remains must look, she thought, like leeches, scavengers hastening the destruction of some
immense, decomposing corpse, adrift in the turgid Air of the Pole. Many of the City's former inhabitants,
recently refugees, had returned to Parz to seek belongings and to help with the reconstruction. There had
been some looting, true and too many people had come back here, intent on picking over the remains
of a City which would not be restored to anything like its former completeness for many years.
But Hork's emergency edicts against a mass return to the City seemed to be holding. Enough of the
City's former inhabitants had dispersed to the recovering ceiling-farms of the hinterland and stayed
there to work to reduce fears of famine. And genuine reconstruction and recovery was progressing
now. Already teams of workers had succeeded in locating the surviving dynamos. The great
engines which had once powered anchor-band currents had been cleared of rubble and stumps of
infrastructure. Now the dynamos floated in clear spaces, their lumpy Corestuff hides gleaming dully in the
purple light of the Quantum Sea as if they were immense, protected animals.
It could still go wrong, Dura thought uneasily. The fragile society left adrift by the Xeelee Glitch could still
fall apart disintegrate into suicidal conflict over dwindling resources, over once-precious goods from the
old Parz which had been reduced in value to trinkets by the disaster.
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But not just yet. Now, people seemed on the whole to be prepared to work together, to rebuild.
This was a time of hope, of regeneration.
Dura welcomed her own aching muscles and stiff back. It was evidence of the hard work that comprised
her own small part of the Mantle-wide rebuilding effort. She felt a surge of optimism, of energy; she
suspected that the days to come would comprise some of the happiest of her life.
In a clear space a few mansheights from the car, the Human Being Mur had been showing Lea a pretty
girl who had once been a Surfer how to construct nets from the plaited bark of Crust trees. The two of
them were surrounded by a cloud of half-coiled ropes and abandoned sections of net. Little
Jai reunited with his father wriggled through the Air around them, nude and slick, grasping at bits of
rope and gurgling with laughter. Lea was brandishing a length of rope in Mur's face. "Yes, but I don't see
why I have to do it over."
Mur's voice was cracking with anger, making him sound very young. Compared to the City girl, Mur still
looked painfully thin, Dura thought. "Because it's wrong," he said. "You've done it wrong. Again! And
I "
"And I don't see why I should put up with that kind of talk from the likes of you, upfluxer."
Toba placed his hands on the girl's shoulders. "Lea, Lea. You shouldn't speak to our friends like that."
"Friends?" The girl launched into an impressive round of cursing. Toba looked pale and pulled away
from her, dismayed.
Dura took the rope which Lea was rejecting. "Perhaps Mur didn't explain," she said smoothly. "You
have to double plait the rope to give it extra strength." She hauled at sections of it, demonstrating its
toughness.
"But the way he speaks to me "
"This plaiting is finely done." She looked at Lea. "Did you do this?"
"Yes, but "
Dura smiled. "It takes most Human Beings years of practice to learn such a skill, and you've almost
mastered it already."
Lea, distracted by the praise, was visibly struggling to stay angry; she pushed elaborately dyed hair from
her forehead.
Dura passed the rope to her. "With a bit more help from Mur, I'll be coming to you for instruction.
Come on, Toba, let's take a break; I'd like to see how Adda is getting on."
As they moved away Dura was careful not to make a show of looking around, but she could see that
Mur and Lea were moving back toward each other, warily, and picking up sections of rope once more.
She felt rather smug at her success at defusing the little situation. And she was secretly pleased at this
evidence that the Human Beings were managing to adjust to the situation they'd found here at the
Pole better than some of Parz's former inhabitants, it seemed. Dura had expected the Human Beings to
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