Ram Kikura programmed the pictors from where she stood. "There is now a pedagog, based on my personality," she said. "You may use the data services from any of your apartments and the pedagog will help you. It would be best to begin with the city and Way description. . . agreed?"

The seven of them watched in silence as the Axis City was projected before them in hypnotic detail. They seemed to approach the city from out of the north, swooping along very close to the singularity—the flaw—and passing through several dark shields.

Their point of view then fell to very near the wall of the Way, until they seemed to hover a few hundred meters over the flowing lanes of traffic. Heineman twitched when he saw rushing tank-like cylinders conveyed along multiple tracks below them, each cylinder equipped with a circle of brilliant forward-facing searchlights on the nose and three bands of running lights along the side. In the distance, a four-kilometer-wide gate terminal accepted thousands of the cylinders from all directions. (A visual appendix briefly showed them the interior of the terminal—a maze of multilevel switching yards, cylinders being rerouted, guided into sheds to be loaded or unloaded, the contents being transferred to different containers for their trips into the gate. The gate itself was much wider than the ones they had encountered—a stepped hole at least two kilometers wide, resembling an open-pit mine but more regular and much more crowded with machinery.)

The Axis City was awesome from any angle, but from near the surface of the Way, it was overwhelming. The pictor highlighted the northernmost parts of the city and explained their functions, then their point of view moved south.

The farthest southern extension of the city was a broad Maltese cross, extended from two cubes mounted one behind the other on the flaw. The center of the cross accepted the flaw, which then extended through the cubes. Here was the machinery which powered, propelled and guided the city along the singularity. The same effect that could move the city along the flaw, and had propelled the tuberider, also provided much of the city's energy. Generators within the cubes were spun by turbines whose "blades" intersected the singularity and were subjected to the spatial transform.

(Where does the energy ultimately come from? Patricia asked herself. Did the question even have meaning?)

Beyond the two cubes was a wineglass-shaped buffer, the broad end placed flush against the first spinning cylinder, Axis Nader, where their quarters were located. Axis Nader was the oldest section of the city. After the final transfer of the orthodox Naderites from the Thistledown, they had been moved into Axis Nader, which became a kind of Naderite ghetto.