Adda, as was his custom, stayed a small distance away from the rest as they Waved across the field-lines. One of his eyes was matted over with the scars of age — thinking about it now he gave that cup a quick poke with a fingertip to dislodge some of the less welcome little creatures who were continually trying to establish residence in there — but the other eye was as keen as it had ever been, and as he Waved he swept his gaze through the Air above, below and all around them. He liked to stay apart to keep an eye on things... and it allowed him to hide the fact that he sometimes had trouble keeping up with the rest. It was his boast that he could still Wave as good as any damn kid. It wasn't true, of course, but it was his boast. He used to wriggle across the Magfield like an Air-piglet with a neutrino fount up its arse, he recalled wistfully, but that was a long time ago. Now he must look like a Xeelee's grandmother. Adda's vertebrae seemed to be seizing up one by damn one as time wore away, so that his Waving was more like thrashing; it took a conscious effort to thrust his pelvis back, to let his legs flop behind the motion of his hips, to let his head drive ahead of the bending of his spine. And his skin was coarsened by age, too, tough as old tree-bark in places; that had its advantages, but it meant that he had trouble feeling the places where the electric currents induced in his epidermis by his motion across the Magfield were strongest. Damn it, he could barely feel the Magfield now; he was, he thought sourly, Waving from memory.

Much like sex these days.

As always he carried his battered and trusted spear, a sharpened pole of wood prized from a tree trunk by his own father hundreds of months ago. His fingers nestled comfortably in the gripping grooves carved expertly in the shaft, and electrical currents Magfield-induced in the wood tingled in his palm. As his father had taught him, he kept the spear pointed along the direction of the Magfield across which they climbed... for, of course, the wood — in fact any material — was stronger in the direction of the Magfield than across it. And as any child knew, if danger did approach it would most likely come along the Magfield lines, in which direction motion was invisibly easy.

There weren't many predators who would attack humans, but Adda had seen a few, and his father had told him of worse. The rays, for instance... Even a mature Air-boar — the tougher cousin of the Air-pig — could give a man or woman a hard fight, and could carry away a child as easy as snipping krypton grass away from the Crust, if it was hungry enough.