Dura felt honored, and she said so. She considered the distance to the caravan. "Will we have the time to get there and back, all in a single off-shift? Maybe we ought to go to Leeh and postpone our next shift — do a double."

Rauc grinned. "I've already fixed it. Come on; find yourself something clean to wear, and we'll go. Why don't you bring your stuff from the upflux? Your knife and your ropes..."

Rauc followed Dura to her sleeping-nest, talking excitedly the whole way.

—

The two women dropped out of the ceiling-farm and descended lightly into the Mantle.

Dura dipped forward, extending her arms toward the caravan, and began to thrust with her legs. As she Waved she was still wondering if this was a good idea — her legs and arms still ached from her long shift — but after some time the steady, easy exercise seemed to work the pains from her muscles and joints, and she found herself relishing the comfortable, natural motion across the Magfield — so different from the cramped awkwardness of her work in the fields, with her head buried in an Air-mask, her arms straining above her head, her fingers thrust into the roots of some recalcitrant mutant plant.

The caravan spread out across the sky before her. It was a chain of Crust-tree trunks stripped of roots, branches and leaves; the trunks were bound together in sets of two or three by lengths of rope, and the sets were connected by more links of strong plaited rope. Dura had to swivel her head to see the leading and trailing ends of the chain of trunks, which dwindled with perspective among the converging vortex lines; in fact, she mused, the whole caravan was like a wooden facsimile of a vortex line.

Two humans hung in the Air some distance from the caravan. They seemed to be waiting for Rauc and Dura; as the women approached they called something and set off through the Air to greet them. It was a man and a woman, Dura saw. They were both around the same age as Rauc and Dura, and they wore identical, practical-looking loose vests equipped with dozens of pockets from which bits of rope and tools protruded.

Rauc rushed forward and embraced the man. Dura and the lumberjack woman hung back, waiting awkwardly. The woman was slim, strong-looking, with tough-looking, weathered skin; she — and the man, evidently Rauc's husband Brow — looked much more like upfluxers than any hinterland or City folk Dura had met up to now.

Rauc and Brow broke their embrace, but they stayed close with their arms linked together. Rauc pulled Brow toward Dura. "Brow, here's a friend from the farm. Dura. She's an upfluxer..."

Brow turned to Dura with a look of surprised interest; his gaze flickered over her. He resembled Rauc quite closely. His body was lean, strong-looking under its vest, and his narrow face was kindly. "An upfluxer? How do you come to be working on a ceiling-farm?"