The last weeks of one g passed, and never did Nirgal begin to feel comfortable. It was frightening to feel the clamping pressure on his breath and his thinking. His joints hurt. On the screens he saw images of the little blue-and-white marble that was the Earth, with the bone button of Luna looking peculiarly flat and dead beside it. But they were just more screen images, they meant nothing to him compared to his sore feet, his beating heart. Then the blue world suddenly blossomed and filled the screens entirely, its curved limb a white line, the blue water all patterned by white cloud swirls, the continents peaking out from cloud patterns like little rebuses of half-remembered myth: Asia. Africa. Europe. America.

For the final descent and aerobraking the gravity chamber’s rotation was stopped. Nirgal, floating, feeling disembodied and balloonlike, pulled to a window to see it all with his own eyes. Despite the window glass and the thousands of kilometers of distance, the detail was startling in its sharp-edged clarity. “The eye has such power,” he said to Sax.

“Hmm,” Sax said, and came to the window to look.

They watched the Earth, blue before them.

“Are you ever afraid?” Nirgal asked.

“Afraid?”

“You know.” Sax on this voyage had not been in one of his more coherent phases; many things had to be explained to him. “Fear. Apprehension. Fright.”

“Yes. I think so. I was afraid, yes. Recently. When I found I was . . . disoriented.”

“I’m afraid now.”

Sax looked at him curiously. Then he floated over and put a hand to Nirgal’s arm, in a gentle gesture quite unlike him. “We’re here,” he said.

• • •

Dropping dropping. There were ten space elevators stranding out from Earth now. Several of them were what they called split cables, dividing into two branching strands that touched down north and south of the equator, which was woefully short of decent socket locations. One split cable Y-ed down to Virac in the Philippines and Oobagooma in western Australia, another to Cairo and Durban. The one they were descending split some ten thousand kilometers above the Earth, the north line touching down near Port of Spain, Trinidad, while the southern one dropped into Brazil near Aripuana, a boomtown on a tributary of the Amazon called the Theodore Roosevelt River.