Dura was barely able to keep her attention focused on this prattle. The thought of being marooned at the Crust, with only these dullards for company, made her heart sink.

At last Frenk's ceiling-farm filled the clearwood windows. The car settled to rest at the center of a group of crude wooden buildings, and the doors opened.

Dura scrambled out and Waved away from the others. She took a deep breath of clean, empty Air, relishing the sensation in her lungs and capillaries. The Air stretched away all around her, an immense, unbroken layer stretching right around the Star; it was like being inside the lungs of the Star itself. Well, the company might leave a bit to be desired, but at least here she could breathe Air which didn't taste like it had been through the lungs of a dozen people already.

Qos Frenk himself was there to greet them. He picked out Dura, smiling with apparent kindness at her, and while the other coolies dispersed among the buildings, he offered to show Dura around his farm.

Frenk — dapper, round and sleek, his pink hair flowing over an elaborate cloak — Waved confidently beside her. "The work is straightforward enough, but it needs concentration and care... qualities, sadly, which not all coolies nowadays share. I'm sure you'll do a fine job, my dear."

Dura was wearing a coverall woven of some crude vegetable-fiber cloth, given to her as a parting gift by Ito. As she Waved it grated against her skin constantly, as if chafing her all over, and she longed to tear it off. On her back she carried a round pod of wood — an Air-tank, like the one she'd seen Toba wear, with a small mask she was supposed to fit over her face to help her breathe the rarefied Air of the upperMantle. The bulky, unnatural thing impeded her movement even more than the City-made clothes, but Frenk insisted she carry it. "Health ordinances, you see," he had said with a philosophical shrug, his ornate cloak bunching around his thin shoulders.

Under the coverall, she still wore her length of rope and her small knife.

The farm had largely been cleared of tree trunks; the exposed forest root-ceiling was seeded with neat rows of green-gold wheat, of altered grass. Here, hovering just a few mansheights below the wafting, swollen tips of mutant grass, she could no longer see the boundaries of the farm. It was as if the Crust's natural wildness had been banished, overrun by this claustrophobic orderliness.

Of course the orderliness covered only two dimensions. The third dimension led down to the clean, free Air of the Mantle which hung below her, huge and empty. The Parz folk had not yet succeeded in fencing off the Air itself... All she needed to do was to throw this Air-tank into the round, delicate face of Qos Frenk, and Wave away into infinity. These soft City-borns — even the coolies — could never catch her.